“Darkest Dungeon isn’t a Dungeon crawler, as it didn’t make me feel Dungeony while playing” - Joseph Anderson. Follow up video: “Dungeonivity is Implied”
Interesting topic, and I think you handled it fairly. I don't remember Darkest Dungeon that well anymore. I might disagree with some of my own video if I played it again now. I streamed a run of DD2 and thought it was also fun but that was just a quick look. I don't think RNG is necessarily a bad thing in games, even particularly difficult games. I love Slay the Spire. I still play it on my own time since streaming it a few years back. I never played DD1 after the video. I have one point of clarification and question, if you don't mind. - The "tedious, careful" play was rooted in a criticism about grinding. As was that Hellion's death, and I speak about it first before getting into combat roll randomness. DD1 was patched quite a bit after my video (not *because* of my video, of course, but some of what I said in it was coincidentally addressed). Back at release, the amount of time that had to go into levelling champions and getting them ready meant that a death like this was quite a set-back. It fostered a lack of experimentation and creative investigation of the mechanics in me because of that. Some could also view that as a flaw on my playstyle but I hope they would say that only if they experienced the game back then as I did and know just how damn grindy it was. I don't have similar criticism in other difficult games that use RNG in this way when a failed run isn't tied to hours of repeating content to get back to where I just was. The RNG comment was also criticism levied against the game outside of combat rolls, and onto dungeon layouts and enemy encounters--frequency and formation, wise. IIRC (and maybe this has been patched too) there were plenty of times a dungeon was over after just a few rooms and other times I had to backtrack through long linear layouts, bored out of my mind, when the game started me in the middle of the line with a dead-end several rooms on either side. - The question is about the Hellion's death. "Nothing I could have done" is of course an exaggeration but I think it's a reasonable one that makes a fair point. Obviously if I knew *exactly* what was about to happen when I went into the room, then armed with that knowledge I could likely have prevented that death. So the question becomes, is that a fair expectation--to know all of that ahead of time? I can't remember if I even knew those enemies were capable of that high a damage burst when I was playing at that point. After that I did, but then that plays into the harshness of DD1's lessons and how much the death can set you back. Obviously if I went into that battle with a Hellion on 1 hp then I would rightfully concede I made a lot of mistakes to get into that situation. But I think the state of the party upon entering that room isn't bad by any means. Maybe you're correct though, but that honestly would have made me dislike it more because of how grindy it was when punishing these learning experiences. On the flip side, if the punishment wasn't nearly as long, I think learning these types of encounters/interactions can definitely be interesting. StS has many of them. Anyway--cool topic. Good video. I think it'd be fun to revisit the game all these years later but I don't know if I could justify the time investment. Also I might be too biased against it given how miserable it made me, haha. A comparison with DD2 would be an interesting slant as well.
Oh hey, didn't think it likely you ever saw this, I appreciate the kind words. Thank you. Regarding the question, I think it's complicated. What I'd be advocating for is less specific foreknowledge of the exact line, and more an awareness of the variety of ways things *could* go. So to say not walking into the room and knowing precisely what will happen, but being aware of the way things *could* happen in relation to the current state of your party, and whatever other factors might be at play. I'm working under the relatively balanced (to me ig lol) assumption that by the time you're in Champion dungeons, you've seen Point Blank Shot from the Bloodletter at least a few times. I think knowledge of the *exact* specifics of the move's parameters isn't a reasonable ask, especially when the game itself doesn't provide that information, but knowledge in fairly vague terms that it can hit pretty damn hard can inform decisions as to whether or not its danger needs to be respected. Like, I think even outside of the specific way things play out in that moment, a high-rolled Point Blank Shot could've put you in a pretty precarious position. All it takes is a couple more things going wrong in other ways, and there's a risk of the Hellion dying in other ways. Basically, I agree the party was in a good state entering the room. Everything else is totally fine aside from the Hellion being a little bit low. It's one of those really niche cases where something that typically isn't that threatening is in a position to pose real danger due to the particularities of the current gamestate. Like if you showed up to Act 3 in Slay the SPire with a deck that happens to really struggle with the Spikes shape thingy. Awareness of the exact parameters of the Bloodletter's damage or not, there's a threat here that even without specifically a big crit highroll into an instant kill, bears respecting. So to answer the main part of the question, I think it's a fair expectation that the player - especially late into the game - be able to recognise *potential* dangers in a way that might alter how they play that fight. At the end of the day it's a game of odds and risk management, and sorta necessarily entailed within that is a disparity in the severity of any given punishment. Something I'd add to this is that while it certainly wouldn't soften the blow, and it's worth remarking on Darkest Dungeon's grindy nature - especially when you made that video, as several changes have been implemented since to cut down the grind a bit - I think the loss is somewhat overstated due to this embedded notion that if you lose this Hellion, you need to level up another Hellion in order to get back to where you were. This is true... if 'getting back to where you were' actually matters in this sense. What I'm getting at is that Darkest Dungeon is not a game that is difficult enough that you need an exact roster to beat it, nor do you *need* an exact set of 16 characters for the last 4 quests. Basically the only thing that would be important in that way for an average player is to make sure you have a supply of about 4 Vestals around because Vestals are stupid broken, as well as being the only reliable healer. Hellions are fantastic, probably the single best frontline class, but if one dies, you can quite readily progress the game without needing to train up a new Hellion from scratch. I'm sympathetic to the pains of losing characters that have come to be large investments of resources and time, I play lots of games like this and I never fail to get frustrated by those instances, but I don't think it's correct to imply that the loss is compounded by the additional grinding time to level up a new Hellion. Darkest Dungeon has a grinding problem of a kind - but unless you're haemorrhaging heroes left and right every run, I don't think permadeath has much of anything to do with it. The way the roster is and the way it levels tends to play out in such a manner that you've got plenty of people waiting in the wings to be brought up in a fairly short amount of time - though they may not be the exact class you *want*. I'm not completely certain, but I believe this would be the case even before some of the anti-grind provisions they've thrown in over the years. I think that gets at the core of the disagreement - I think that a character death is much less of a severe punishment than you do. It sucks, but it's not a setback that entails several hours spent grinding to recoup from. Or at least, it takes a bit more going wrong for this to be necessary. Everything else sort of cascades from here - especially since I think a good grasp of Darkest Dungeon combat means that even experimentation can be done in a position of relative safety. Even from the perspective of a newer player. The game has, in many ways, got notably harder since you made your video. The Crimson Court exists, stuns have been widely nerfed in terms of reliability, good mainstay characters like the Houndmaster have received nerfs, the Shrieker exists to steal trinkets, Champion dungeons are even scarier now with even higher tier Brigands plus specific dangerous enemy types that only show up in them, so on and so forth. There are additions in the player's favour of course like Districts from The Crimson Court, the new classes and somesuch, but on the whole I'd say the game has become more difficult with time. But even at the game's hardest reaches outside of Torchless, you've in the worst case got plenty of time to recognise that things are going wrong and retreat before you lose too much of value. Darkest Dungeon, outside of Bloodmoon (what was NG+), does not have a failstate. All you ever lose is time,. and you can mitigate your time-losses by behaving cautiously when aiming to be experimental. The game's biggest problem in terms of incentivising over-caution is in stalling, which is something Red Hook have repeatedly tried to nerf out of the game (with dubious success). I guess to an extent there's even the Farmstead - the Colour of Madness DLC added an endless 'wave defence' mode in which characters that die come back a couple of weeks later or so. (Didn't know where to fit this in but I also want to mention they made dungeon layouts even more random in most areas lmao, there's now a variable number of tiles between rooms, and each different zone follows a different sort of script for generating dungeons - with the Weald's layouts often being nightmarishly sprawling in the way you're describing, while the Warrens layouts are very consistent) To return to the point a little bit though, I think it's absolutely worthwhile to talk about the amount of information the player receives. Darkest Dungeon 2 gives you a fair bit more to work with once you've seen a move for the first time, and it's to the game's benefit. Darkest Dungeon's focus on stress and its willingness to be very cruel to the player is a large part of what it's trying to do, but once you've *seen* a move, I don't know that there's much harm in the game disclosing more information about that move to you. There's other games like Into the Breach that are absolute masterclasses in making every aspect of the game environment crystal clear, but some part of this is acceptable only because of its different design priorities. What works for one thing may not for another, and so on. Finally I think it's worth mentioning in case it's not clear that I'm totally down with whatever preferences you may have for games regardless of my own perspectives thereon. Darkest Dungeon has a lot of aspects that make it easy to dislike. Just don't think it should be catching flak for things that are not necessarily its own fault. Hope that addresses everything, sorry for the sizeable wall of text haha. Can clarify anywhere if needed. Thanks again for taking the time to watch, and for the reply. Very much appreciate it.
Just wanna jump in and say that, as an Efap and mauler fan...I like you Joseph...yep...genuinely love your videos. I've watched your Mario Odyssey review about 4 times. Yeah that's it really, cheers!
As someone who has played over 100 hours of Darkest Dungeon, I never understood Joseph Anderson's criticism. Yeah, things will go wrong and I’ll lose people. The text before the main menu tells me that. My job is to account for that. Sure, it can absolutely be frustrating. I had runs where seemingly everything went wrong, but can I claim that I had no way to prevent some of those issues? I can't say I do. Prevention is the name of the game.
Thank you for having a coherent and actually depthy response rather than the brainlet response ive seen people say to RNG where it's just: "Well, of course you react negatively to the bad outcome. But you never notice when it's overwhelmingly good for you, do you?" As if that's some kind of argument in favor of RNG systems and not just a dismissal. Theo always depivers on well thought out arguments and im here for the feast of content lately.
As someone who plays a lot of RNG-based games, I have come to the conclusion that the role that would kill you is usually the nail in the coffin you made to that point. For example, if I leave cover and stand next to an alien and I'm not in cover in xcom and miss a 90% chance to hit, that is bad luck, but it's my fault for leaving myself so open for the next round. Instead, I should have stayed in a better position and taken a 40% chance shot or used an item to help one of my other troops while staying safe. RNG in games may be infuriating sometimes (I still love it), but it's up to the player to offset that as much as they can and prepare for things if they go wrong. Interesting video, Theo.
@Theottree this is literally the 2 Random numbers vs 1 Random numbers issue in Fire Emblem. We see a 90% to hit and assume 100% in our minds. With 1rn the odds are 90% as displayed, but with 2rn the odds are secretly closer to 98% instead which makes it feel right. The various FE games spent some time flip-flopping and experimenting with what system to use, but it's the arguably most "honest" games with a full 1rn system get the reputation for Random bullshit. Our brain loves sloppy shortcuts but math is a cold bitch.
Great video. I listened to you on some podcast months and months ago and was impressed particularly by you. Although I was disappointed to see you had less than 5 videos I do respect how well thought out and detailed your videos are. Do hope these continue.
Awesome video Theo. Wasn't sure what to expect from your videos, but your tone is great, the editing is solid, the content is presented well and overall just made for an awesome little case study. Looking forward to more videos!
I have never played Darkest Dungeon, and therefore am not able to offer my opinion on this game, as I don't understand the games mechanics. But what I can recognize is the quality of this video, and the nuanced, measured perspective that allows someone like me to have at least some idea of what's going on without ever playing this game. Great vid, made me want to check out a game I've never heard of before.
Yea i never liked Josephs dd 1 video. I remember checking if point blank shot did more then 75% of hellion health. It doesn't, just 69%. So if he did some of the "tedious" prep work as you mention he would been fine. Heck I have done 0 death run with all bosses, but most of it was preppering for each location and bosses. What he called busy work. But this video have given me some insight how I should look at rng besides darkest dungeon. At very least think before yelling "I had no options"
I think The Crimson Court is excellent and essentially 'completes' the base game. I think the extra wrinkles it adds to the gameplay loop do a great job of throwing more wrenches into the player's ability to 'control' everything. Between the curse, invitations, blood supply, timeliness of clearing the court quests (which itself allows some other characters like the Jester to shine due to his proficiency at long-term sustain), even The Fanatic and whatnot. Its bosses and enemies are dangerous and creative, and the entire audiovisual design of the crimson court and its denizens is a straight home run. The Colour of Madness is also pretty good on the whole; I'm not all that interested in an 'endless mode', but it is unintrusive, has value even in a 'regular' playthrough, and introduces some really neat enemy types in the form of the husks, and the extra spinning plate of the Thing from the Stars, who is really fucking scary and is worth avoiding or planning around. I think the endless mode is cool on its own merits, even if I'm not all that invested in trying to minmax it, personally. Also a very neat aesthetic - decidedly a bit less so than the Crimson Court though. Very good music. Butcher's Circus I quite liked; I played a decent bit of PvP in it, and found it to be pretty enjoyable. Not the best balanced or most robust of systems, but it was enjoyable enough to dig around in for a while, trying various compositions to see what sort of stuff would work and what would not. Also kinda fascinating to see it as a sort of 'prelude' to DD2's gameplay w/ stuff like Daze. And finally I guess the Shieldbreaker. Shieldbreaker is maybe my favourite class in the game, so maybe that speaks for itself lol On the whole I think DD1's DLCs only ever enhanced the game, but the really big one is the Crimson Court. I don't necessarily think you should use it for a first playthrough, but after that, it really does make the game whole.
@Theottree The content in itself is good, the blood vile resource management in particular fits perfectly it feels like it was there from the beginning, but I don't know if it's integration within the campaign's progress is as good as it could have been. From my experience I found myself completely avoiding the new areas until like half of the playthough. Not because it's too hard, you can play around the hazards eatch area introduces without too much problem, but because 1. I don't find the challenges of said obstacles engaging. The thing from the stars is so scary that it eitheir basically banishes one area eatch week or forces you to take a big risk until you are in a confident position to both face it and afford to heal the stress you will necessarely suffer. And the mosquitos spawning in every single area just becomes redundant, specially because the mosquitos don't feel that much unique compared to other mobs in the base game. 2. I don't think the rewards are worth the trouble during the early game. It's not lile the reduction of stress heal is that big of a pain. And the districts are too expensive for me to consider them worth saving for until the late game. So I don't feel incentivized towards taking the DLC content as an organic part of my progress in the campaign, more like a side challenge for when I am already in a comfortable position.
Look at you makin videos. Great stuff. I've never played DD, but your video was comprehensive and easy to understand. I look forward to more videos. You are a true Longman.
The only time I had a situation where I couldn't do anything in my 240 hours of playtime was where a Chevalier did Subterranean Skewer, landed crit on my Hellion for full hp, applied bleed and then it was Hellion's turn and the bleed damage tick killed her at a Death's Door instantly. These instances happen, but people seem to ignore when they get lucky.
What ye mean?! When i critted that eldritch horror with a 46% leper hit on my last action. Wasn't luck, aint no fluke, pure skill and calculated to bitter end. Ah my team died anyways.....
Yeah, stuff like this happens, but it is cosmically rare. We are talking RNG on hit chance of Skewer, RNG on bleed% vs Bleed res%, RNG on damage range of the attack, then we have other 3 heroes that threw their speed dice next round and all landed lower than Helion, despite her having death’s door debuff, and then finally Death’s door RNG for her to die. People hear stories like these and project them on their own gameplay, where they leave stress casters alive, cheap out on provisions, and come to conclusion that “suddenly dying” in DD is just a thing that happens.
While I generally agree with the points here, I will play the other side for a moment, and I do have a bit of a point to make by it. Because, it absolutely is possible to get simply terribly unlucky. I have next to no experience with Darkest Dungeon, but I do know about TTRPGs, and I'll be the first to tell you that encounters can absolutely go sideways-even when played as best as possible-when the dice misbehave. It is a simple possibility that, with a large enough sample-size of rolls, you will occasionally run-into encounters where everything you do fails and everything the enemy does succeeds, even when doing your best to maximize a positive outcome. However, I will circle this back around to the positive angle that simply is risk. One of the big appeals of tabletop is that good decisions can go horribly wrong, and bad decisions can somehow have a ludicrously positive outcome, as this fits the immersive nature of the game. Sometimes that pillar really might be unstable enough to drop on the boss; on the other hand, even an experienced rogue might slip-up while disarming a trap. It all creates circumstances that have to be dealt with uniquely. Sometimes these do tend to stack-up and snowball at rates they, statistically speaking, shouldn't, but that's just part of the tradeoff of this feature. There's also the simple reality... and this may not be universal, but when everything's always going right, it tends not to be as fun. Without RNG, the game either has to genuinely outsmart you or pull something totally unpredictable and/or unfair to change things. However, RNG allows all manner of ways to shake things up without essentially cheating. If instead of a certainty, you have an array of possible outcomes, then it becomes possible for the player to weigh them, choose the risks they find most suitable, and possibly even prepare to mitigate a bad result. A player might, for instance, have to chose between an all-or-nothing risk case and a safer, more predictable trade. This can, once again, create unfair circumstances-sometimes that safer trade might end-up costing you in the long-run, as the HP you wasted is sorely missed later... but the all-or-nothing risk might've also been even worse had it backfired. In which case, neither would've been the correct option. I am simply unprepared to make an assertion about whether this kind of circumstance is possible in Darkest Dungeon, or whether mitigation/outright prevention of it is a desirable outcome, but I do want to give mention to it nonetheless. This all being said, I'm not entirely sure if it's wrong for a game to have the potential for unfair outcomes in the first place. Maybe I'm projecting a bit, but I don't think most people play permadeath games or challenges (Ironman/Nuzlocke runs) to never lose anyone-sure, a perfect survival rate may be the goal, but if you're consistently able to produce that result... then it would begin to feel as if the feature/challenge didn't exist. That is, of course, a bit of an adjacent point when we're discussing RNG in general, but I think it still bears some mentioning.
When it comes to RNG, the problem is not that it exists, but WHERE in the event chain it occurs. You want it to happen earlier, so that the player can reliably predict the outcome of actions. Slay the Spire is a good comparison (glad you mentioned it). You have similar type of combat, and the game has loads of randomness. But the player has many options when dealing with it, from using potions at the right time, to buying (or not) more potions, artifacts, or other cards from shops. Or what cards to add/remove to the deck. Main difference is that in Slay the Spire, all the RNG occurs earlier in the chain. Attacks are telegraphed to you, and it tells you EXACTLY how much damage they do. All effects do what they say, without any randomness. This allows you to make more precise decisions. Where as in DD, the RNG occurs AFTER you have committed to a decision, such as how much damage an enemy attack does, does it crit, does Death's Door kill you, does a stun actually work, etc...... The short version is this - RNG that randomizes how your attacks play out is generally bad, proportional to how much difference there is between best case and worst case. So an attack that does 15-20 damage is fine, where as one that does 5-30 would be much worse. RNG that occurs BEFORE that will usually be good. As for "accouting for enemy damage", how are you supposed to account for an attack that does 1-40 damage (exaggerating for effect)? By assuming that it will deal 40? THAT is what Joe called "boring and tedious". Hope this all makes sense. Cheers. Glad you are still posting, and that your Elden Ring video didn't get you torched by the FROM community.
Why is RNG earlier in the chain necessarily bad, though? I understand that we end up with more variance and swingier variance, but as Darkest Dungeon shows amongst many other games of its type, better players find far more frequent and consistent success than worse players. I appeal to this because it shows something about the player's ability to account for the variance present in the game, even in an unabashedly swingy game like Darkest Dungeon. Furthermore I think it is worth respecting that Darkest Dungeon is a game that is actively built to be swingy in this way - it is playing into core pillars like stress around which the game is designed. To me RNG tends to only become problematic when it is actively infringing upon player agency. I think a degree of this is arguable with Darkest Dungeon, but it's pretty clear that the game is very, very clearly winnable - the variance only really goes crazy on Torchless, where the first few weeks especially are a bit of a shitfest, and there are many heroes who cannot be run simply because they are too squishy to be reliable in the face of random crit-spikes and whatnot. But I think it is fair to describe this as outside of the game's usual balance parameters - it is strictly an optional challenge mode. The point I'm trying to get at is that I'm down to concede that Darkest Dungeon can be a very swingy game - that's built in. I just think it takes more justification to describe that level of variance as bad, when it does not appear to meaningfully infringe upon player decisions in the majority of cases, and it is working in service of something the game is doing. If I was going after a game for its variance I'd probably go after Inscryption's Kaycee's Mod. At harder difficulties especially you're left heavily at the mercy of variance in a way that is very difficult to control for in any meaningful way. Alternatively, there's always the lay-up of Hearthstone lol Regarding accounting for enemy damage, I don't think you have to always expect the 40, nor do I think you can fully account for such a swingy attack - but what you can absolutely do is think about what the possible results are, and how you can account for those results, if at all. If it becomes clear that there's really nothing you can do in the even that it rolls 40, then you shouldn't play to shore up against rolling a 40. Sometimes the enemy will roll a 40 and you won't be able to do anything about it, and maybe this means you lose - but this can happen in Spire too. Think about fights against Nemesis. Say you're Ironclad and have Disarm, the variance between it doing a multiattack and a big attack is enormous, and your ability to do anything about either is somewhat dictated to you by your draw order. To say nothing of thin decks and multiple burn adds putting you in terrible spots. This is all extremely swingy, despite the intent system - and you have to be thinking ahead about what *could* happen before you actually see the intent, or your draw. In many ways this is not that dissimilar to Darkest Dungeon. Ty for the reply, sorry for the followup wall lol
@@Theottree No worries at all. I'm glad that you care enough to respond. As far as the game being designed to be swingy, Joseph did say that the devs succeeded in making the game they wanted to. Just that, as an actual experience, it was miserable. Partly due to the Permadeath, which meant that, in addition to losing the fight, you might have to grind for hours to get back to that point. Imagine if in Slay the Spire, a really bad loss could set you back 2 Ascension levels - That would be truly awful. I suspect this is going to come down to taste. For anyone who like the kind of RNG and swinginess of DD, well, I can't really argue with that. My tolerance for that just isn't as high. Your comment of "being punished for making the right play" is very accurate - that feels really awful. I am reminded of Xcom Enemy Unknown (2012 release), which felt quite similar. You could sometimes get blindsided by something really unlucky, and part of the fun was making plans ahead of time to account for it. It could be thrilling - but also frustrating. Like when an enemy hits you in full cover, and rolls highest number, AND a crit, killing your guy instantly.......good times.... Also Hearthstone........the only proof you need that HS is fucked is that they printed a card that reads: 10 mana - cast 10 RANDOM spells. As in, from any class. And this was apparently acceptable....... Cheers, mate. Perhaps you will be our new Matthematosis - a Chap with a lovely voice offering smooth and balanced critique.
Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel have attacks that do 1-20 damage, and they even have attacks that do 1-20 damage twice, and they have attacks that deal 1-20 damage 5 times at maximum. They also have other modifiers that increase damage by flat amounts, increase crit chance, increase hit chance, and many other more minor effects, after you start using weapon mods. These are widely held to be possibly the best Star Wars games of all time, and among the best Western RPGs of all time. They just also have much higher health pools, so average damage per attack is much more important, because you pretty much have to try to get into a situation where the most extreme of extreme bad RNG will actually kill you, because even the highest possible damage amounts are still less than your hit point total, and you have other resources aside, including flat damage absorption and ablation. The randomness is not a problem because included as part of the design is a large degree of control over randomness and mitigation of the effect of randomness. Even in the absolute worst case scenario where you just fail RNG checks consecutively during normal gameply for 2 minutes straight through no fault of your own whatsoever (something that I don't believe has happened to literally anybody ever, or would if we gave a billion people until the heat death of the universe to encounter it, given how unlikely it is), it's still fine because the consequences are just reloading to the last checkpoint or save, which probably happened about 10 minutes ago.
@@brofist1959 Generally, you can mitigate RNG by spreading it into more, but smaller events. So, one attack that deals 1-20 damage FIVE times, is much better than one that does 5-100 damage ONCE. Because the distribution will be much more towards the middle, and the edge cases will be VERY rare.
@@TheFuzzician That's true, but more importantly is that the impact of RNG is continuously mitigated despite there being so incredibly much RNG. My point is that something dealing 1-40 damage isn't bad inherently, it's bad within a wider context. It's fine in KotOR, it probably wouldn't be in Darkest Dungeon, and this context is precisely why I think Mr. Anderson isn't necessarily wrong in principle about the RNG of DD not being particularly enjoyable for most people, and dare I say it, it may even be pretty poorly designed.
I will say, it is annoying when RNG does go... sideways. A "fun" recent example I got from last year was when I was playing Baldur's Gate 3. I went to speak to a friendly npc in a friendly zone early on, so I wasn't expecting a fight. Well, story stuff happens, fight starts. I actually thought the outcome was scripted because of how badly it went for me. I didn't even get a single action before the enemy force sniped a key character and I was greeted with a... rather unfortunate cutscene. I was about to praise the devs for such a bold decision when I realized just how many quests I had set up that failed in that moment. Decided to load and low and behold, it wasn't scripted. I just got stupid unlucky.... and not quite as but still pretty damn unlucky the next three times I attempted the fight. Was there "Nothing" I could have done? No, there were definitely some things which could have helped. Even in the scenario where I was not expecting the fight (Various potions and things which last until your next long rest or even having a different party composition that had an additional quick acting character). That said, it does make me wonder at what point is is the player not accounting for reasonable variables, bud luck, or bad design? Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
Most of the things you could have done would need your knowledge of what is possible, and accounting for possible outcomes can break immersion. Just as a first time DD player wont know which corridor has how much % chance to spawn what enemy that has what % chance of isntakilling you at your current light level
@@texteel True. The annoying thing is I had some knowledge on attempts 2, 3, and 4, one of which involved a lot of furniture shuffling before the fight, but for whatever reason I just couldn't stop them from sniping that character. Also, I assume BG3 player's who've done this scene will know which I'm talking about. Mainly just not giving deets to avoid spoiling. But yeah, it did pull me a bit out of the game as I ultimately decided to hold off talking to this npc, therefore preventing the fight, until I had leveled and explored a bit. Annoying because it meant I had to explore with a handicap initially given plot stuff. Eventually went back to the fight and got it dealt with, and even despite the enemies being trivial, it was annoying how close it was just because of said npc coming close to getting dropped from what few attacks that did make it through.
2:30 The real issue is that Joseph didn't have any agency at the enemy's turn. If the enemy didn't take their turn, no such bad luck is possible. Something tells me that this bit is about having the wrong expectations rolling into a game you know has these RNG elements and not factoring them in to your decisions. The clip where Joseph says his bit is that he's even frustrated that he has to play carefully - when that's literally what the RPG elements of the game are about. It's almost like Joseph refuses to take games seriously or something, based on clips of what I've seen of his game streams and his reviews.
I would also point out that Joseph was apparently supposed to have factored in RNG to such an extent that his every decision needs to be questioned. And that’s where the issue lies. There just comes a point where RNG is so unmanageable that it feels like a wall. And this moment where Joseph loses his character with no chance of reversing it? THATS the stuff that would piss me off. So he switches up the characters. Would his crusader have been able to endure 32 hp of damage and not have triggered the death door? Even still, his crusader would have been taking a total of 39 damage on turn 1. That would have his healer spamming healing to salvage the situation, on top of the plague doctor needing to buff the healer with speed so they could hopefully get in front of the damage. Because the healer lost in terms of speed on BOTH enemies. So immediately, with one turn, Joseph would be on the back foot in both situations.
I am factoring Darkest Dungeon's RNG elements into my decision to not play the game. I don't mind a bit of RNG, but I am entirely opposed to such a heavy emphasis on it with incredibly cruel punishments for failing dice rolls. Sure, perhaps he could have made a different decision in this specific scenario that would have lead to a different result, but his different decisions could also have failed the RNG check, and we would end up back in this spot. It's fine if failing an RNG check results in a punishment, but I'm not interested in spending hours grinding to get back to where I was.
@@nhagan001 It's not the outcome, it's what Joseph took from it. He had a situation where the RNG screwed him and in his review his conclusion drawn was "There should be less RNG." His mindset was in the wrong place because he didn't take the game seriously. When you get into the details and the numbers, then, the argument could have been that the game was too difficult, and so would become a discussion on what difficulty Joseph played at, what would be considered reasonable numbers, as well as what is a reasonable margin of error, and all that. Because if it really was such an oppressive scenario, then an argument can be made about how the devs balanced the numbers at higher difficulties. But that's not what he said. The issue is that Joseph did not enter that state of post-battle analysis and assessed what he was doing and what the game gave him. He just went "Aw dang it" and said he preferred what would be essentially a different game because "if there was less RNG he'd have more agency" or something along those lines. That's the issue here, beyond any tangential questions of "was Joseph playing well or not" because again that's always balanced against the numbers the game gave him. The issue is that he hates being served those numbers, "fair" or not, "difficult" or not.
@@afelias no no, the RNG didnt screw him over. He didn’t “manage his risk” enough. He should have known that the room he was rolling into had two enemies that were going to crit and death door the front character. He should have anticipated having no control of the situation. Plan around not being able to walk as a cripple. And that’s where the issue comes in. Eventually you go from desiring the positive outcome to “hopefully” crossing out enough negative outcomes to have a least one leg to limp out of the dungeon with. Eventually you go from risk management to “I better know percentages of every outcome at every time.” Babysitting RNG at every moment. It’s no longer a desire to win, it’s not losing to the possible “rolled a 1 in DnD” in the most crucial moments.
@@nhagan001 You're just doing the same thing there, you're not taking the game seriously. "It's no longer a desire to win, it's not losing"? That is the whole point of success and failure states in a game. If you "don't lose" long enough, you win. Fighting games are a long series of matches where you lose less HP than your opponent, over a series of rounds. If you "don't lose" enough rounds, you win a game.
Had a lot of such moments playing Noita recently, also an rng-heavy roguelike. So many deaths feel like were out of my control as they happened, something going wrong and leading to death in seconds. But as the frustration passes and if I take a moment to think about what happened, it becomes obvious how much of my choices led to me dying, especially not being careful enough because I got comfortable with things going smooth.
I personally really like external variance, but despise internal variance. Essentially things like "what will the enemies do", "what is the battle map", "what cards will I be dealt at the start of the turn? (sts)" are really fun. But things like "Once I click this card on an enemy, it will do 2-6 damage randomly", or "when I click this enemy, I have 50/50 chance to miss and do nothing" are infuriating. I'm not even sure if there's a fundamental difference between the two but one just feels way better to interact with specifically because it instills a higher level of agency in me. It makes me feel like I'm a competent controlled entity fighting external chaos, rather than fighting against myself. I wonder if you categorize these types of variance separately as well.
I don't really articulate a distinction of that kind myself, but I know I've felt that frustration with lowrolling attack numbers or missing or what have you. However to me it feels very much similar in character to the frustration I feel in Slay the Spire when I open all block cards on a debuff turn, or all attack cards on a big attack turn.
Two minutes in, and I think the biggest problem with J.A's situation is that he forgot the number one rule of games where characters can permanently die. He didn't play around the crit.
That’s the last thing on the list of errors there. At what point is it fine to stop blaming poor encounter design, and ok to start blaming players for not paying attention and misunderstanding the game? If the player tries to zerg rush the boss, and he kills him before he can do it-is it bad game design, because boss’s numbers are bigger than player numbers, or is it the player’s fault, because he played recklessly?
Edit: Changed my mind Tbh I think besides not eating the food beforehand Joseph made the most strategically sound decision he could have. Immediately brute forcing an enemy at the get-go reduces their damage by nearly 33%. He could have just as easily lost a hero because the 3 enemies attack the same hero. I think its a little unfair to retroactively say "well you could have done this" when doing that could also have lost him a hero. He's not downplaying his agency he's not understanding how he should have played differently. Part of the problem is so many of the probability numbers aren't communicated. Most numbers are invisible
I don't think his play was terrible by any means, if I came off that way that's not what I meant. But it's pretty undeniable to me that he didn't respect the potential danger that room posed and just sorta went on autopilot. Against the majority of other enemy groups his play is fine, but this play in this spot leaves him very vulnerable to some really really dangerous spots due to Point Blank Shot. I don't think it is strategically sound to not adequately respect that danger. I'm not trying to argue from a post-hoc sense. I don't think you need foresight into the future to acknowledge that your Hellion has a small chance of being in some real danger. Again tho, his play isn't bad - it's just rigid. He is deeply concerned with hero loss but is not playing in a way that respects the possibility of a hero loss. I think there are other lines that make that remote possibility even more remote if that possibility is acknowledged. Also fwiw it's not necessarily true to say that killing an enemy reduces the enemy party's damage by 33% or so; this will probably be the case sometimes, but it depends on enemy composition. Killing the Fusilier saves a lot of HP probably over the course of the fight, but it doesn't save *important* HP in a sense, if we think in terms of the potential Hellion death. Divine Comfort from the Vestal on a few stall turns or after the alpha strike handily deals with whatever the Fusilier puts out.
I am by no means a DD expert but I reckon whatever he did to reduce the whipper to half should have been a stun. Either it was one swing crit which then most of the time provides much less value (as 3/4 whip dude still needs roughly two strong and one weak attack to go down simmilar to full health) or he spent whopping two actions to damage him which is just plain wasteful.
Follow up comment: Good video Theo. I enjoyed the discussion. I know it doesn't say much, but it still should be said. Looking forward to the next one.
The negative RNG isn't presented as categorically bad, it's when mixed with the permadeath and grindy aspect of the game that means that said bad RNG, instead of putting you back a couple of minute before when you last saved, richer with the experience acquired and lesson learned, means that you're going to be spending a few hours to level another of that character with the frustration that this entails. Your point that there are steps he could've taken to prevent it is moot because it just falls into the former point that the game encourages you to play in a boringly careful fashion and punishes experimenting. Your whole point about stuns is largely correct however, I don't think arguing that a player is in the wrong for not following the meta is a stance anyone would want to take. It'd be like me saying that your complaints about Radahn's combo being undodgeable is invalid because you should have summons that are going to draw his aggro and you should have been running X/Y/Z build that would've killed Radahn in 13.5 seconds preventing him from using that blow in the first place anyway. It's technically correct, it is something you can do to prevent the problem from happening but we're losing focus of the original criticism (not to mention it being a horrible argument in general): that being the layers of RNG in addition to the perma-death and grindy-ness of the game discourages a manner of playing which JA finds interesting. A part of his video outright states that the devs absolutely achieved their goals with the game and that he just finds the end result unfun and, imo, he fairly demonstrated why. Now I get that the central thesis of your video is that players tend to downplay their own decision-making when there are easy external factors to point to and blame instead but to make an ER comparison again, this is like saying that players shouldn't have a problem dodging Waterfowl Dance as it is absolutely dodgeable (even without tricking her AI into going the wrong way or sprinting away) instead of pointing out that the animations of the move do not communicate its hitboxes clearly. Both stances are true and devaluing one in favor of the other just seems very limiting. Interesting video nonetheless.
Bringing up Elden Ring is a great point. How much does Theo talk about “telegraphing” being important for a boss? A boss with limitless stamina and heal catching? Irregular combo attacks that go from 3 to 6 to 4? I wonder what Theo would think of Elden Ring if it was as RNG as DD? Debuffs chance to resist? Never 100% guaranteed sword strikes? Chance of your healing being denied? The enemy getting two free attacks on your before your allowed to move?
I don't think it's true that the game encourages you to play 'boringly careful' though. I've done plenty of experimenting - it's how I ended up good at the game. I don't really disagree that Darkest Dungeon could be considered overly grindy; I think that's a perfectly fair problem to raise. And I don't at all disagree that losing characters you invested a lot into is frustrating - it absolutely is and absolutely should be. I just don't think the game is at fault for occasionally harshly punishing negligence. If you could just reload back a bit, or got your character back in short order, it would deprive the experience of some of its peaks and valleys. You can experiment and mess around with compositions plenty if you want to, you just have to play the game well subsequently. Alternatively, you can put less stock in your heroes - you certainly do not need an exact roster to clear the game on Bloodmoon. Losing a Hellion sucks, Hellions are really good - but the loss of a Hellion does not then mandate that you immediately recruit and focus on training up a new one. This is not necessary. I understand why a player would want to, but I think it is important to recognise that the game is readily beatable without doing so. I will say that this video was made before Red Hook made some changes to the game to reduce the degree of grind. Like I said, I think there's some validity to the point, but I don't think permadeath or variance play into that point really at all. For the Elden Ring comparisons, I don't think they map well. I'm not encouraging Joseph to play 'meta', as such, in the same way as someone telling another player to pop Mimic Tear. I'm not asking him to respec, or use anything outside of his current toolkit, or really do anything differently other than a slight change in approach in a singular instance to better account for the current gamestate. If he replied that he doesn't want to use stuns or thinks they make the play experience worse, I'd probably want to pursue that logic a bit, but it's not material - that's fine. However he has the stuns equipped on his bar and from the looks of things had them on his bar for the whole game more or less. He seems aware of the power of stuns even if they go unmentioned, and he seems not to be shy about using them. He chose not to in this scenario. And it's not as if the enemy behaviour is inscrutable in the way that a player's possible responses to Waterfowl might be. This is a Champion dungeon; Joseph has undoubtedly seen a bunch of Bloodletters at this point, and is undoubtedly aware of Point Blank Shot as a move. He knows that what happened *could* happen, somewhere in his mind - but his play doesn't reflect that reality. He has all the information but did not use it, as opposed to an Elden Ring telegraphing scenario in which the player just doesn't have the information until they've seen the attack come out several times. This is less of an issue for a game with a structure like Darkest Dungeon, because it is built with the reality that you'll see the same enemies many many times in mind. I am aware Joseph was making a different point here than criticising RNG. I take his words on RNG throughout the video to be strictly negative; he doesn't have anything good to say about the presence of variance, and he has plenty of negative. But here he's talking about the grind, which, like I said, might have some validity to it though I disagree with how Joseph articulates it. I just found the particular phrasing here to be a very strong demonstration of how we work in terms of agency and blame and fixed thought processes regarding variance. Sorry for the wall of text lol, ty for watching
@@Theottree Wall of texts are great, don't apologize for making 'em I think the game absolutely does encourage playing overly carefully as a beginner which is the experience Joe was describing. Obviously somebody with deep knowledge of the mechanics, information acquired from outside of the game (such as certain hidden values etc) and a wealth of experience to draw on will play in a different manner but I don't know at which point it's fair to invoke that particular person's point of view in favor of a new player's. I agree that losing a character should be frustrating in that kind of game but there is a discussion to be had on how quickly you should be able to lose one and what that particularly entails for your run. If I lose a really good sniper in x-com I can just level another up relatively painlessly by putting him in a "safe team", essentially getting carried by higher level units which is rewarding me for my previous plays (i.e keeping enough units alive that I don't start from the bottom again) and is overall speeding up the process greatly. In return the loss I feel for losing said scout is the pain of losing a character I've lived through potentially dozens of missions with and who has, more likely than not, saved my ass an untold amount of time: it's the end of a diagetic narrative and it's, to my sense, more than enough punishment for a poor play when added to the mechanical loss. I don't think "you can beat the game without doing X" is really a solid argument, there are plenty of challenge runs out there for all kinds of games that are out of what would be reasonable to expect of a player but still did complete the game, but that's besides the point I'd make: the game does train you into feeling more comfortable with certain strong units as a new player and does seem to punish experimentation, as a new player will not have the necessary knowledge to "play well" since that knowledge requires experimentation which in turn will set your run back by quite a bit feeding into a negative feedback loop until you acquire the "skills" (in this case skill being knowledge based instead of mechanical). The mechanical loop of the game encourages a new player to find some teams (or at least a few team cores) he's comfortable with and to only stick to those as it is the best way for them to make nearly surefire progress. Obviously I'm not going to say that this is the only way to play the game but I do think it's important to recognize that this is a behavior the game is very likely to reinforce for a new player that doesn't bother looking for outside ressources (videos/guides/streams about the game). The elden ring comparison were mostly hyperbole to make my point stand-out and I could probably rephrase them dozens of ways around your response to make the square fit into the circle hole but that would be silly: I was mostly making the point that suggesting a playstyle change in retrospect that would have accounted for mild chances is different from pointing out mechanical flaws in the playstyle at any given moment. The logic you used could be extrapolated into "he made the wrong choice bringing X/Y units to Z dungeon" which could be extrapolated into "he made the wrong choice building X/Y units this way instead of Z way" and so on and so forth which can be fair points in some cases but I don't really know if it applies here. As you pointed out what happened to him was extremely unlucky and though I don't want to bother calculating the chances, we settle on him having "failed" 4 33% rolls back to back (That particular skill coming out, then criting, then the second enemy selecting that same target and then the character failing the death's door check), that comes out at around 1.2% chances of something happening which, imo, is unlikely enough to consider it reasonable for a player to not take into account as a possibility when making plans, in fact I'd consider someone making preparations for such a situation to be completely insane -and not in the sense "insane at the video game"-. As an aside, if you want to see the RNG blaming behavior in full effect, I suggest you take a look at morrowind's combat and its reputation. A simple hitchance based combat with relatively straight-forward mechanics (hitting is harder when you're tired, hitting is harder with a weapon you're not skilled in, hitting is harder if the enemy is good at defending) has lead the vast majority of the people who try it to consider it an inherently flawed system instead of considering that maybe they were just playing the game wrong (and I do mean playing the game wrong). Pretty interesting stuff to see happening.
@@nhagan001 I don't think your points in particular as espsecially valid given the difference in genre. Debuff chance resists are represented in the form of resistance in ER whilst hitchance is represented in the form of the player's accuracy when making a strike. You, the player, don't whiff an attack in DD much in the same way that your character doesn't miss an attack that you the player hit in ER. There's also a fact to consider that the implementation of such RNG in Elden Ring would inherently mean that the player ought to benefit from it in some ways but at this point we're changing the genre of the game from action to RPG.
@@naunau311 in ER, you can make your ability to overcome resistances and accuracy with much more certainty than in DD. Can you not upgrade yourself, your weapons, or use items to get over the obstacles of the mentioned factors? In DD, you have to devote turns to reducing the high resistances and evasion to then implement your desired outcome. Theo brings up the Spiders and their speed and evasion abilities. Take for instance the chance to stun in DD: You have to score on accuracy, then score against evasion, then overcome resistance chance and your resistance trigger. In ED, you apply your buffs to yourself to mitigate all these factors at your leisure. The distance from a boss lets you apply effects with chance to evade if you’re interrupted. Fail the stun in DD because of accuracy, evasion, or resistance, and there is no rolling away from the consequences. Fail to debuff in ED? And you GTFO to get your bearings.
Quite the polite way to tell someone they have a skill issue! Jokes aside, I experienced something similar when xenonauts 2 first released into EA. As soon as chance is involved people just can not except when they play poorly.
While I generally agree with most of your points, there are some interesting counterpoints to RNG in games. I will mainly use Slay the Spire(Henceforth StS) for my examples because it is in your examples as well, and I'm more familiar with it than darkest dungeon. Let me preface this with - I think RNG is a necessary component for a lot of games for 2 reasons: 1. Replayability - This one does not need much explaining just imagine how boring StS would be without random card draws / routes / shops / enemies. 2. Skill level - Games without RNG like say chess have everything dependent on your skill which diminishes the ability of new player to win the game. Hence before even starting the game one knows that unless they git gud there is no chance of winning. For many this is the factor which deters them from learning the game in the first place. No one likes to feel stupid for hours on end. That is not to say chess is bad it has other mechanism to vary difficulty like opponent skill level, but even chess had dice in it at its conception. Now to the main course. Here are a couple of counter arguments to RNG in games. 1. Meta knowledge - While some may attribute it to skill RNG often introduces knowledge that user can not gain from the game itself that can alter your win chances. In StS the famous example is first floor fight. If you know how game RNG works after seeing the first floor enemy you can know if a question mark floor right after is or isn't a fight, which can influence your decision. Again for some this is skill to others having external knowledge is unfair. Thankfully StS unlike GeoGuessr doesn't require you to have that knowledge to be good at the game. 2. Lack of clarity - You did mention this briefly, but I would like to delve deeper on this point, because it's my main gripe with RNG in games. You did say that it's hard to know which action led to your loss in the end, but my main problem is it might not have been any of your choices. There are 100% proven unwinable seeds in StS and that makes me doubt that any of my actions even CAN improve my chances. It might be, all I'm doing is waiting for milk to spoil to win at slot machines. Obviously, one can point at a higher win percentage and say they are improving, but unless someone replays all your seeds you might not know if you just got lucky that many times and got runs that are just destined to win. It's not a surprise that a lot of cheaters in speedruns turn to manipulating RNG as their main strategy because its next to impossible to prove. Anyway, this rant cannot have a conclusion, so I'll end here. Liked the the video, very interesting topic. Keep up the good work.
Something that I think is going unmentioned here that I believe is vitally important to variance and its place within games is that management of odds-based or variance-involving systems is a form of skill expression all of its own that *requires* the presence of variance, or RNG, to exist. RNG doesn't just allow a newer or less skilled player to win sometimes by highrolling, it creates the conditions for completely different forms of skill to be expressed in the forms of maximising one's percentage-points against the odds - reducing vulnerability to low rolls where possible, and reducing reliance on high rolls to attain victory. In addition to adding replayability and variety to a game experience, they test the strength and *flexibility* of one's decision-making. Funnily enough with Spire, that's specifically an issue of the game *not* being 'random' enough. Slay the Spire generates its seeds with corrolated RNG, which allows observations about the following floors based on the first fight due to how it generates its values. Many players and streamers, knowing this, opt to play with a mod to remove the corollated RNG, while also encouraging others to not 'explain' the system to players who cannot so that they are not then aware of it in a way that will affect their play regardless of if they consciously choose to capitalise on it or not. I also want to mention that only one seed that I know of in Spire has been determined as mathematically unwinnable. There are others that are up in the air - but to determine if they're winnable or not involves all sorts of considerations and checks that don't actually involve playing well at Slay the Spire. I don't think checking for unwinnability is ever really a good way to go with these sorts of games, as the majority of the time, the information needed to determine if a gamestate is unwinnable in a game involving randomness will not be available to a player playing normally within the confines of the game. Ofc it becomes a problem if a game is proving consistently mathematically unwinnable despite good play, but I don't know of a game that is provably doing that. I do though tend to agree broadly that many games of this sort could do with providing a bit more information to the player about what enemy capabilities are, at the very least once the player has seen that enemy/that attack. In an ideal world, I'd not have to go to the wiki to find the exact damage range and crit chance of Point Blank Shot - I'd just be able to see it. I think there is a potential slippery slope with information overload as opposed to the player having to work outside the game for pertinent knowledge to their decisions, but that's a fuzzy, fuzzy slope. For an example of a game that does a great job of giving you information though, Into the Breach's enemies behave with a considerable degree of variance - but the game tells you their available tiles, their attacks and their properties, the order of actions (including DoT and environmental effects), and much much more. It's an impressive feat of clarity. What I more meant with the point regarding clarity is that due to the nature of variance, it's very hard to determine which decision, set of decisions, or even theoretical approach to decision points, is the cause for lower success rates. I could watch Jorbs, or Xecnar, or Baalor play a run of the spire and win it, then load in and play a very similar run and lose - and I may very well not be able to tell which decision points I ran into resulted in my defeat. Whether I misplayed a fight, or if my entire conceptual approach to how I was pathing and what nodes I was choosing and what cards I was taking was incorrect. It takes a lot of skill to be able to assess lines effectively this way, and it's also not conducive to helping the player build up a robust understanding in a quick manner, if at all. I don't know how much these games can be blamed for this - what are they supposed to do, exactly? We can think about all sorts of *potential* triage solutions, things like giving the player access to a full replay of their run or something similar to that, but it is by no means an easy task. Sometimes you make the right play and get punished; sometimes you make the wrong play and get rewarded. The game can't reasonably be said to be doing anything *wrong* in these instances, because if we start curtailing these, we essentially defeat the point of building around variance in the first place. Hope that addresses everything, cheers for watching and I'm glad you enjoyed :)
Interesting video. I'll admit I don't play very many games with large amounts of variance like this, I just typically don't enjoy having to account for variance to the degree you'd have to account for it in games like Darkest Dungeon. The closest thing I typically end up playing are RPGs with much more standard amounts of swing to them. Though, this does remind me of something I encountered yesterday playing the demo for Metaphor. So, that game has some pretty standard JRPG rng swings. Hit chance, crit chance, flee chance. Simple stuff. However, the weirdest thing about the game's combat is that no matter what the battle state is, you can always hit L3 to completely reset the battle. Yep, full reset to the state the player was in at the beginning of the fight. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if the game used the same RNG seed when you reset a battle, but nope. You can, if you so choose, attempt to flee a battle and just reset the battle if you fail. No cost, no limitation (other than not being able to flee during bosses and whatnot). It's also worth mentioning that this was on the hardest difficulty that the demo had available (apparently the full game will have one more difficulty higher), so this wasn't just an option for easy mode. seeing that, then watching this video, really makes the variance in combat outcomes seem meaningless. The only thing keeping a player from resetting whenever they get a bad rng swing, or not getting a good swing, is the apathy threshold of not wanting to bother trying a battle over and over again. Just a tangent I thought of. Either way, keep up the good work.
IDK if the 15 minute tangent about not getting ice cream as a child because your mother rolled dice every night for dinner was necessary, but a good video otherwise.
Lovely video. Might be time for me to buy Darkest Dungeon. I think there’s another conversation to be had about the relationship between game knowledge as part of game skill, since it’s not always treated that way. The way “skill” is used often just makes me think they’re talking about reflexes.
I enjoyed watching this case study. The subject of RNG and player agency is one I've been contemplating quite a bit as I analyze the game design behind the mobile card game Marvel Snap. It's often maligned with the same criticisms presented in this video, where players assert they are placed in unwinnable situations due to no fault of their own. As with Darkest Dungeon, there are certain arrangements that are truly unwinnable, but the game was intentionally designed around such circumstances. Instead of testing a player's ability to simply win as many games as possible, it tests a player's resource management and risk mitigation. The game is structured like poker, where you can bet or fold to either increase the value of the current game or cut your losses and leave. It's why the official mode used for tournaments occurs over multiple matches and gives both players a finite amount of resources. A common criticism of this mode often occurs when a player loses their final match due to a completely unwinnable setup, but to say there's nothing they could have done is to disregard the previous 5-6 matches and the misplays that were made prior. I don't want to discount the criticism in full, as I figure there is gradation to it. When playing a game like Candy Land, the criticism is justified as there is truly no strategy to grant a player any agency. The player that won would have lost if the starting turn order were rearranged. If we transition to something like Rock, Paper, Scissors, the criticism varies depending on how it's played, as certain conditions can introduce opportunities for skill expression. However, even the greatest RPS player of all time can still lose to a complete novice very easily, something that couldn't be said about a game like chess. What I tend to look at when it comes to this topic is consistency. If players can consistently pull off winstreaks or stay on top of the leaderboards, it tells me there's enough expression for players to overcome RNG. It's why I didn't believe the claims made about Wildfrost being too RNG heavy when that game first dropped.
Hey I’ve really started watching your videos and really liked your SOTE critique. I heard you’re into monster hunter too, is 4U worth playing? I finished iceborne and loved it! Fatalis and Alatreon were fantastic (minus that dps check nonsense).
Rng can turn off a lot of players when the low rolls come around, especially at higher difficulties. Whenever I see players play these sort of games, while I understand their frustration, there is a degree of truth that they still have agency that they couldve used to offset the bad Rng. There are instances I can think of from other games where it's the fault of the game devs for not telegraphing the proper actions to the player. For example, Fire Emblem the Blazing Sword on Hector Hard mode requires players to retain specific items or find secret shops in prep for a very tough map many hours later. Else, the player will suffer many debilitating effects on their team that the game throws at them, on top of hard enemy spawns. I very much enjoyed this video and hope to see more on the topic. (Would love to see you tackle Slay the Spire too as a huge fan of that)
People that argue like Joseph in his original video have never played a game like Chess. Sometimes giving up a piece is necessary to give yourself a better position in one way or another. In a game like Darkest Dungeon you will have to make decisions like "Do I let this character die to ensure the rest have a better outcome or do I keep them alive and take the risk"? The concept of giving up something to get something is EVERYWHERE in games, it's just most of the time you aren't thinking about it because it's subtle.
Even with 700+ hours in these games I've had runs where I entered a fight. Rng party got startled and had characters die on the first round before I can even make a single move many times. Shits painful.
I've had plenty of really rough circumstances but I don't think I've ever run into a character death before I could act, in about ~670 hours of playtime. I've seen it and I know it can happen, but I think I've been somewhat fortunate. Or I've suppressed the memory lol
@@Theottree this usually happens from bosses. The last time this happened to me as the Flesh boss killed my vestal turn 1. Those damn tails. I've also achieved Grand Slam on DD2. So I've had both tremendous luck and some instances like this that where just unavoidable.
I had one run go with that had a Flagellant and vestal in DD2. 80% DB resistance. Flagellant died first DD roll of the run. Vestal later survived 7 DD rolls with 30% chance.
i'm a certified 100% RNG hater and even then "i died, there was nothing i could've done there" isn't part of my list of gripes with it. my biggest problem with rng generally is the opposite, bad players can sometimes get rewarded, which can lead to bad habits.
Yeah that's a design problem that these games have to contend with. Sort of a cursed problem - the very nature of variance means that sometimes the incorrect play is rewarded and the correct play is punished. Which can have an obfuscating effect on what is right to do.
@@Theottree yep, it's to some extent instrinsic to the mechanic, though certain design can mitigate it at a high level (if the best player can still win with the worst luck). you seem to talk about variance instead of rng, are those two synonymous to you? i think variance can exist without necessarily pulling a random number but i want to know what terms are you using.
"This is the consequence of me not respecting the potential danger of point blank shot." I have some problems with this sentence. Firstly, the player has to know the specific enemy with the specific attack is possible. The player has to know the possible damage range for the attack. The player has to know what position the attack can target. And only then can the player even think about respecting it - at the cost of not respecting gods know how many else attacks with potential for 1 hit killing. Where can the player even learn these in the game? How can a player tell the maximum and minimum damage of the attack? How can a player decode if the previous 23 times was the RNG being funky, is can this attack really only target the character in the first position? These pieces of information are obscured from the player by design.
This will have been far from the first time Joseph has seen a Bloodletter, and far from the first time he's seen a Bloodletter use Point Blank Shot. This is a Champion-level Dungeon; he's almost assuredly seen this enemy type many many times before. In the most charitable possible case to him, he is still well aware that the enemy has a move that does a lot of damage, and seems to only target position 1. He doesn't need to know the exact specifics of every possibility of the move to respect possible outcomes from it. Even without the character death we see, just a high damage Point Blank Shot could've put Joseph in a lot of trouble even with his character alive. As I said maybe the player should be privy to a bit more, but they're not. This is one of the slight improvements Darkest Dungeon 2 makes over 1; it gives the player more information on enemies and, once they've seen them used, their moves. The 'surprise' factor is still there for moves and enemies you've never seen, but once you have seen them, you get better information to base your gameplay on.
@@Theottree eh, true. I guess my problem with the sentence I quoted is not accurate to the context you used it, because to me it sounded like "respecting point blank shot" is something that should be expected of every player, regardless of their experience with the game. Thank you for engaging with my comment in good faith regardless of my fuckup
Reminds me of competitive pokemon, of all things. Most moves have chance to miss, or a chance to inflict a certain status condition, or can land a critical hit for 50% additional damage. This variance turns a lot of people off from the competitive scene, but they miss the fact that high level play pretty much never is determined by RNG. Risky play is pretty much asking to be smitten by RNGesus, and it’s the risky players fault for even putting themself in that position to begin with.
What I hate about all this is that the difference between a player and a 'skilled player' is often not in how they approach any given situation, but their willingness to play the obvious meta stuff that's better than everything else. Choosing to play meta has a way more severe effect on your chances of winning than any mild incremental, cumulative increase in skill.
'Playing meta' in these games is more or less just playing in a manner that maximises one's odds at victory. So like, it makes a lot of sense that the consistently better players consistently play in ways that make them more likely to win - but it's notable also that they are able to win without 'playing meta' as well. People have beaten Darkest Dungeon without Vestals, without Stuns, etc etc. Moreover, the thing with these games is that the optimal play will often entail a choice that is 'non-meta', or not typically strong. The nature of variance is such that it creates scenarios in which lesser-used options sometimes get their chance to shine when the stars align. Or the gamestate simply presents something that the 'normal' best play cannot easily handle. Joseph is very much playing meta in this clip of his. He's running all 'meta' characters with their 'meta' skill loadouts and trinkets, and the basic principal behind his move choices - alpha strike backline, clean up frontline - is the conventionally understood best manner of handling the majority of fights. So to say, I don't really agree. But at the same time, making good choices in terms of your approach to the challenges presented to you is part of the skill expression in these sorts of games. Worse players have rosters they've taken worse care of, with worse quirks locked in and more diseases, they bring worse compositions, provision worse, and play those compositions worse. In strategy games like this, the validity of making worse choices in the pursuit of expressing some sort of personal playstyle (I'm not sure what this would even mean) seems like a really peculiar idea, especially to level at a game critically. Is it an issue with Poker that I have limited means to express my own playstyle, and my playstyle may often be notably worse in terms of expected outcome than the better play?
@@Theottree Yeah on the last Efap you were on you mentioned wanting to play it soon, though I’m happy it’s much sooner then I would’ve expected. Whether you make a video on it or not I’m just happy you’re playing it.
Not gonna lie, when I saw his Elden Ring critique followed by his effusive praise of its' DLC, I knew he had no idea what he was saying in his DD review. SoTE had all the base game problems magnified by 10, and he seemed to ignore that, along with plenty of other things in his Zelda reviews.
There is a couple of things that are unmentioned in this video. 1. How this kind of RNG effects future decisions, and not just analyzing the past ones. That's what I initially though the video is gonna be about, how a player gives up on possibilities they have left to capitalize on despite the bad RNG. 2. How it affects a completely new player that does not have the foreknowledge of enemy attack patterns, how a player like that has "things to do" in a situations like that. Cause your analysis comes from an omniscient player perspective effectively. I'm a bit disappointed cause the conclusion of this video is "Git good in your risk mitigation next time bozo", which I think misses the actual progression of gaining such skill and how it happens in actual in game scenarios.
The only thing I really want to respond to here is that Joseph absolutely has foreknowledge of the enemy attack patterns in this case. This is a Champion dungeon. This is not the first Brigand group he's seen, the first Brigand Bloodletter he's seen (the tutorial has a mandatory one), or the first Point Blank Shot he has seen. The questions around a new player first-contact experience with a given enemy and a given move is a very different consideration from whether or not the game has 'done anything wrong' when it punishes loose play in a situation that has a chance to be very dangerous.
Good video! As someone whos played MMO's for years and beat BG3 on honour mode...I HATE RNG! No seriously im so sick of game devs relying on rng for everything nowadays >.
Great video Theo! You should play Balatro you will love it lol, also what's your opinion on the RNG in XCOM 1 and 2? I feel the combat is the sole reason I cannot get into that game at all, as it largely relies the percentage chance for hits. It can be so infurating that you have the best strategy you can have and still lose, hence why I believe save scumming is a thing in that game. I would just prefer a harder game than RNG in XCOM's case, or have something like DD where you have more agency to help you out in these cases. Also I feel using Slay the spire in this case is a bit different as it is run based right? Does time factor into your assessment as you can have more investment into DD and XCOM campaigns and can lose completely(for XCOM), while slay the spire ( and balatro for that matter) you can be done in 60-90 mins. Cheers
Honestly I feel similarly to XCOM as compared to Darkest Dungeon. The big difference between them is that there is an explicit time limit and non player-dictated scaling in XCOM 2, whereas in Darkest Dungeon the missions available are always based on your roster's level. In combat though you've got loads of agency in terms of your play to handle even the tougher spots - and access to evac lets you quickly get out of dodge in those spots where it is too much. XCOM has its issues and I have my gripes with it, but I think they are really good tactics games where the skill of the player really gets to shine while also offering a wide variety of gameplay circumstances to keep the experience fresh. Regarding the difference between Spire and these games, I don't personally put much stock in the time consideration, as I think the important part is the playing of the game - the time investment is of secondary concern. Like I don't think a long, long run of XCOM 2 that ultimately ends in my defeat is 'wasted' in any real sense. I see these games as 'run-based' in that same sort of way.
The Hellion is best placed in position 1. From position 1 she can attack every enemy rank: 1-2 with Wicked Hack, 2-3 with If It Bleeds, 4 with Iron Swan. You shouldn't really play the Hellion in any other position, as this ability to apply damage anywhere it is relevant is a large part of what makes her so powerful.
When I lose I reset, this might be because i binged Akex Kidd or whatever it was called just like my parents did. They put the solution to the bosses on the backside of the manual, rock/paper/scissiors is 100% consistant other than the last 2 bosses and it has an underwater maze with terrible controls. Must have binged that game so hard it has harsh live count but it's a great one! On the note of DD Hellion is AWFUL for blind playing, by far the worst even Antiquarian has less chance of death because the character is obviously weak both defense and offense so you don't see it as a fighting class while it does give artifacts. Hellion is strong but weaker than glass of course she dies the first dozen uses. Of course Abomination is never learned because transformed is stronger, stress costs money to remove and early on that's not possible. Of course Flagellant is a red hering healer even worse than Occultist early on because of low HP requirement to actually apply the heal leading to him not being learned as a healer. DD is a game of knowledge and numbers, miss one you conplain. Former is a grind of a website the latter is simple will of persistance.
A well thougth out video with some interesting perspectives. If you excuse the diversion from the topic at hand. I'd like to bring to your attention the "stop killing game" movement/action by Ross from Accursed farms. He has long been a vocal opponent to the practice of game publishers "killing" ganes after support end, effectively destroying your property and erasing art. In the last year, he has taken more direct action and come up with several approaches to get the legality on the matter settled. One of the mroe promising of which is a European Citizens Initiative to get the practise essentially banned by EU law. Though such requires 1 000 000 signatories of the initiative so getting the word out about it is vital. I know you are no longer from the EU, but I am sure you got some followers who are. To learn more, I suggest the somewhat tacky named video by accursed farms "europeans can save gaming" as well as the follow up FAQ video. And if you find yourself agreeing with the initiative, please help spreading the word as that is key to actually ending one of the many plagues on modern gaming industry rather than just screaming about it at the void.
4:51 You are basically repeating yourself here and not really responding to Joseph Anderson. What if a player plays darkest Dungeon perfectly and mitigates everything and that still happens? Like his example has clear mistakes, but what is your response if all the characters were at full health and the Zealot was one shotted on the first turn? This can happen in Darkest Dungeon. That's not variance, that's BS! If I always need to use stun to mitigate that BS, that's not really variance and instead seems like there's only one way to play this game to it's end without losing important party members!
If I had a nickel for every video about Joesph Anderson I saw this week, I'd have 2 nickels and while I'm not surprised it happened twice it is weird since I don't watch him
This game bamboozled so many people, just because they believed that the characters are actual characters, and not disposable assets. You can invest quite a lot into them, BUT it is the accessories are the only truly important thing you have to focus on.
Nah fam. Getting the right quirks and debuffs is a make or break on a character. Insanity can fuck you right up if you ain’t spec’d right. Or maybe your slow AF because you don’t have just the right amount of light. Or you constructed your party to fight the boss of an area, but you got fucked by a random Mini Boss rolling up on your ass. Characters matter a shit ton.
@@lolno3906 you literally get an artifact retrieval quest after certain conditions are met. It’s a fight with a super fast, super evasive Raven. It’s almost as if the game is contradicting your “irreplaceable” quote… While you don’t see a “revive your entire party” scenario pop up, now do you? You get it MAYBE, but the artifact recovery quest is GUARANTEED. A good character build being lost is much more of a detriment than losing an artifact… especially when you can count on the game giving it back with a degree of certainty. Are you gonna roll the dice perfectly and get your character that you poured thousands of gold into again?
Artifact recovery quest is guaranteed at some point in the future, IF you can actually kill the Raven and that is big if. I never mourned hero, I always mourned their stuff.
@@lolno3906 I think you kill the nest for trinket recovery, and kill raven to get his own boss trinkets. I disagree on your value assessment as well, to set up a GREAT hero you need to pour insane ammount of gold into him (getting a hero to lvl 5/6, buying skills, upgrading skills, upgrading weapons and armor, getting 3 Good quirks, putting him away in sanitarium for 3 weeks to lock them and paying very high ammount of gold to do so, and paying to remove very bad quirks if they show up) as opposed to, say, doing a quest to get an orange trinket, or even paying the gypsy for it.
I honestly do not understand the point of this video. I know this was not supposed to be a rebuttal to his Darkest Dungeon video, but it sure seemed like that. This moment connects to his larger critique of the game, mainly the endless grind and the unclear rules. Because of that moments like these can seem unavoidable. For example: Talisman of Flame trinket says "-100% DMG and -100% stress DMG from Revelation skill". This is a lie, because Templars still deal chip damage, which can result in a Deathblow. This is the same thing he mentioned in his Elden Ring video, considering Great Runes. From the tutorial you can clearly read, that Great Runes power can give EVEN MORE benefits when you use a Rune Arc, so that means it should give some power baseline. In both instances the game essentially lies to you, and why? It's either been bugged (for 9 and 2 years respectively), or worse, it's a wording error which would take 10 seconds to correct. I have never played Darkest Dungeon, but I love watching it and have watched an ungodly amount of hours. I don't have a psyche for the despair, nor the patience for the grind, and I prefer watching someone else suffer. This reminds me of when I tried the game Xenonouts. There are things there, which I absolutely despise. Cheating computer, unclear rules, enemies not working according to their own descriptions, RNG making your soldiers literally shoot each other in the back, ever encompassing fog of war making it so you are severely reduced in the possibilities of a tactical play... It all groups together into an experience, that was very unpleasant to me, just like everything in Shadow of the Erdteee did to you. Joseph's Darkest Dungeon video had some errors, this section being one of them, but it very well conveyed a message for people's who aren't fond of RNG and hidden rules kicking their ass: Don't bother with playing. And if you like the vibes (which in both Darkest Dungeons are immaculate), just watch Baertaffy.
This islolated incident in joe's video coupled with your statment that it seems unfair/hopeless until you trace the events and decisions that led the incident are true and incitefull when discussing probability as a whole. Most roguelikes (lites) would fit this example however I'll look at one of my favorites and one you have mentioned several time on efap: Slay the spire. As someone with many hours of exp, I believe the biggest adversity and parabol to darkest dungeon risk managment would be card draw. Lets say you're on act 2 boss The Champ and you got him past 50% hp. He enrages and will hit you with massive damage and you need you specific defensive cards this turn however you draw mostly attacks and utility. You may say this was just unlucky and there was nothing you could have done. However, your prior pathing and event decisions, how you constructed your deck based on what was offered as rewards and sold in shops, heck even when you actively chose to drop his health below half, etc; Everything led up to this outcome weither you realize or not. Knowing what cards you need and balancing with what the game offers is crucial to reliable sustain and is exactly what you lay out for Joe's gameplay here. Roguelikes are largely games of hindsight. In darkest's case, you permanently losing a character is the culmination of your choices. Weither Joe likes or dislikes the concept of perma death is irrelevant when he denigrates the game for having said system simply because he made poor decisions. I grew up with a friend who consistently rage quit games we played together, often in a DSP style "It's the games fault" so it is one of my biggest pet peeves for someone to fault a piece of art due to their own impatience, ignorance, or just plain stupidity. I've seen several videos criticizing/using Joe as an example for their topic, yet I appreciate you Theo for your measured and calm look at his reviews. You deconstuct his points to find the answer of Why did he say this/feel this way? especially considering you were once a fan and saw what he's been doing all this time and gradually becoming worse. I love media critiques on youtube (even listening to ones on stuff I have little to no exp with) which why efap has been a wonderful show and you are one of my favorite guests : )
Ah shit ha you even used Slay the spire I apologize for the repetitive comment 😅 Another even more related example I just thought of is being mindful of crit thresholds in pokemon nuzlockes.
@@Theottree tbf i thought there was a possibility to win for a while, but then you got a couple unlucky rolls(especially on the HM) and initiative order wasnt on your side and i was like "nah thats it, better run" xD great video btw
“Darkest Dungeon isn’t a Dungeon crawler, as it didn’t make me feel Dungeony while playing” - Joseph Anderson.
Follow up video: “Dungeonivity is Implied”
Lmao
It's sad this joke cost SOMA
Interesting topic, and I think you handled it fairly. I don't remember Darkest Dungeon that well anymore. I might disagree with some of my own video if I played it again now. I streamed a run of DD2 and thought it was also fun but that was just a quick look.
I don't think RNG is necessarily a bad thing in games, even particularly difficult games. I love Slay the Spire. I still play it on my own time since streaming it a few years back. I never played DD1 after the video.
I have one point of clarification and question, if you don't mind.
- The "tedious, careful" play was rooted in a criticism about grinding. As was that Hellion's death, and I speak about it first before getting into combat roll randomness. DD1 was patched quite a bit after my video (not *because* of my video, of course, but some of what I said in it was coincidentally addressed). Back at release, the amount of time that had to go into levelling champions and getting them ready meant that a death like this was quite a set-back. It fostered a lack of experimentation and creative investigation of the mechanics in me because of that. Some could also view that as a flaw on my playstyle but I hope they would say that only if they experienced the game back then as I did and know just how damn grindy it was. I don't have similar criticism in other difficult games that use RNG in this way when a failed run isn't tied to hours of repeating content to get back to where I just was. The RNG comment was also criticism levied against the game outside of combat rolls, and onto dungeon layouts and enemy encounters--frequency and formation, wise. IIRC (and maybe this has been patched too) there were plenty of times a dungeon was over after just a few rooms and other times I had to backtrack through long linear layouts, bored out of my mind, when the game started me in the middle of the line with a dead-end several rooms on either side.
- The question is about the Hellion's death. "Nothing I could have done" is of course an exaggeration but I think it's a reasonable one that makes a fair point. Obviously if I knew *exactly* what was about to happen when I went into the room, then armed with that knowledge I could likely have prevented that death. So the question becomes, is that a fair expectation--to know all of that ahead of time? I can't remember if I even knew those enemies were capable of that high a damage burst when I was playing at that point. After that I did, but then that plays into the harshness of DD1's lessons and how much the death can set you back. Obviously if I went into that battle with a Hellion on 1 hp then I would rightfully concede I made a lot of mistakes to get into that situation. But I think the state of the party upon entering that room isn't bad by any means. Maybe you're correct though, but that honestly would have made me dislike it more because of how grindy it was when punishing these learning experiences. On the flip side, if the punishment wasn't nearly as long, I think learning these types of encounters/interactions can definitely be interesting. StS has many of them.
Anyway--cool topic. Good video. I think it'd be fun to revisit the game all these years later but I don't know if I could justify the time investment. Also I might be too biased against it given how miserable it made me, haha. A comparison with DD2 would be an interesting slant as well.
Oh hey, didn't think it likely you ever saw this, I appreciate the kind words. Thank you.
Regarding the question, I think it's complicated. What I'd be advocating for is less specific foreknowledge of the exact line, and more an awareness of the variety of ways things *could* go. So to say not walking into the room and knowing precisely what will happen, but being aware of the way things *could* happen in relation to the current state of your party, and whatever other factors might be at play. I'm working under the relatively balanced (to me ig lol) assumption that by the time you're in Champion dungeons, you've seen Point Blank Shot from the Bloodletter at least a few times. I think knowledge of the *exact* specifics of the move's parameters isn't a reasonable ask, especially when the game itself doesn't provide that information, but knowledge in fairly vague terms that it can hit pretty damn hard can inform decisions as to whether or not its danger needs to be respected. Like, I think even outside of the specific way things play out in that moment, a high-rolled Point Blank Shot could've put you in a pretty precarious position. All it takes is a couple more things going wrong in other ways, and there's a risk of the Hellion dying in other ways.
Basically, I agree the party was in a good state entering the room. Everything else is totally fine aside from the Hellion being a little bit low. It's one of those really niche cases where something that typically isn't that threatening is in a position to pose real danger due to the particularities of the current gamestate. Like if you showed up to Act 3 in Slay the SPire with a deck that happens to really struggle with the Spikes shape thingy. Awareness of the exact parameters of the Bloodletter's damage or not, there's a threat here that even without specifically a big crit highroll into an instant kill, bears respecting.
So to answer the main part of the question, I think it's a fair expectation that the player - especially late into the game - be able to recognise *potential* dangers in a way that might alter how they play that fight. At the end of the day it's a game of odds and risk management, and sorta necessarily entailed within that is a disparity in the severity of any given punishment.
Something I'd add to this is that while it certainly wouldn't soften the blow, and it's worth remarking on Darkest Dungeon's grindy nature - especially when you made that video, as several changes have been implemented since to cut down the grind a bit - I think the loss is somewhat overstated due to this embedded notion that if you lose this Hellion, you need to level up another Hellion in order to get back to where you were. This is true... if 'getting back to where you were' actually matters in this sense. What I'm getting at is that Darkest Dungeon is not a game that is difficult enough that you need an exact roster to beat it, nor do you *need* an exact set of 16 characters for the last 4 quests. Basically the only thing that would be important in that way for an average player is to make sure you have a supply of about 4 Vestals around because Vestals are stupid broken, as well as being the only reliable healer. Hellions are fantastic, probably the single best frontline class, but if one dies, you can quite readily progress the game without needing to train up a new Hellion from scratch. I'm sympathetic to the pains of losing characters that have come to be large investments of resources and time, I play lots of games like this and I never fail to get frustrated by those instances, but I don't think it's correct to imply that the loss is compounded by the additional grinding time to level up a new Hellion. Darkest Dungeon has a grinding problem of a kind - but unless you're haemorrhaging heroes left and right every run, I don't think permadeath has much of anything to do with it. The way the roster is and the way it levels tends to play out in such a manner that you've got plenty of people waiting in the wings to be brought up in a fairly short amount of time - though they may not be the exact class you *want*. I'm not completely certain, but I believe this would be the case even before some of the anti-grind provisions they've thrown in over the years.
I think that gets at the core of the disagreement - I think that a character death is much less of a severe punishment than you do. It sucks, but it's not a setback that entails several hours spent grinding to recoup from. Or at least, it takes a bit more going wrong for this to be necessary. Everything else sort of cascades from here - especially since I think a good grasp of Darkest Dungeon combat means that even experimentation can be done in a position of relative safety. Even from the perspective of a newer player. The game has, in many ways, got notably harder since you made your video. The Crimson Court exists, stuns have been widely nerfed in terms of reliability, good mainstay characters like the Houndmaster have received nerfs, the Shrieker exists to steal trinkets, Champion dungeons are even scarier now with even higher tier Brigands plus specific dangerous enemy types that only show up in them, so on and so forth. There are additions in the player's favour of course like Districts from The Crimson Court, the new classes and somesuch, but on the whole I'd say the game has become more difficult with time. But even at the game's hardest reaches outside of Torchless, you've in the worst case got plenty of time to recognise that things are going wrong and retreat before you lose too much of value. Darkest Dungeon, outside of Bloodmoon (what was NG+), does not have a failstate. All you ever lose is time,. and you can mitigate your time-losses by behaving cautiously when aiming to be experimental. The game's biggest problem in terms of incentivising over-caution is in stalling, which is something Red Hook have repeatedly tried to nerf out of the game (with dubious success). I guess to an extent there's even the Farmstead - the Colour of Madness DLC added an endless 'wave defence' mode in which characters that die come back a couple of weeks later or so.
(Didn't know where to fit this in but I also want to mention they made dungeon layouts even more random in most areas lmao, there's now a variable number of tiles between rooms, and each different zone follows a different sort of script for generating dungeons - with the Weald's layouts often being nightmarishly sprawling in the way you're describing, while the Warrens layouts are very consistent)
To return to the point a little bit though, I think it's absolutely worthwhile to talk about the amount of information the player receives. Darkest Dungeon 2 gives you a fair bit more to work with once you've seen a move for the first time, and it's to the game's benefit. Darkest Dungeon's focus on stress and its willingness to be very cruel to the player is a large part of what it's trying to do, but once you've *seen* a move, I don't know that there's much harm in the game disclosing more information about that move to you. There's other games like Into the Breach that are absolute masterclasses in making every aspect of the game environment crystal clear, but some part of this is acceptable only because of its different design priorities. What works for one thing may not for another, and so on. Finally I think it's worth mentioning in case it's not clear that I'm totally down with whatever preferences you may have for games regardless of my own perspectives thereon. Darkest Dungeon has a lot of aspects that make it easy to dislike. Just don't think it should be catching flak for things that are not necessarily its own fault.
Hope that addresses everything, sorry for the sizeable wall of text haha. Can clarify anywhere if needed. Thanks again for taking the time to watch, and for the reply. Very much appreciate it.
@@Theottree I wish RUclips had the chatting emote
Just wanna jump in and say that, as an Efap and mauler fan...I like you Joseph...yep...genuinely love your videos. I've watched your Mario Odyssey review about 4 times. Yeah that's it really, cheers!
@@MrNintendeionhis streams are amazing and I like some of his review videos too
As someone who has played over 100 hours of Darkest Dungeon, I never understood Joseph Anderson's criticism. Yeah, things will go wrong and I’ll lose people. The text before the main menu tells me that. My job is to account for that. Sure, it can absolutely be frustrating. I had runs where seemingly everything went wrong, but can I claim that I had no way to prevent some of those issues? I can't say I do. Prevention is the name of the game.
@@TheOneOrMore heal the hellion and/or stun the blood letter turn 1. Cos ya gonna get crit. Cos DD is gonna try to kill ya 😂
Thank you for having a coherent and actually depthy response rather than the brainlet response ive seen people say to RNG where it's just: "Well, of course you react negatively to the bad outcome. But you never notice when it's overwhelmingly good for you, do you?"
As if that's some kind of argument in favor of RNG systems and not just a dismissal.
Theo always depivers on well thought out arguments and im here for the feast of content lately.
As someone who plays a lot of RNG-based games, I have come to the conclusion that the role that would kill you is usually the nail in the coffin you made to that point. For example, if I leave cover and stand next to an alien and I'm not in cover in xcom and miss a 90% chance to hit, that is bad luck, but it's my fault for leaving myself so open for the next round. Instead, I should have stayed in a better position and taken a 40% chance shot or used an item to help one of my other troops while staying safe. RNG in games may be infuriating sometimes (I still love it), but it's up to the player to offset that as much as they can and prepare for things if they go wrong.
Interesting video, Theo.
Slowly, gently... this is how a video is made...
Overconfidence is slow and insidious killer
"Massiveness is a slow and insidious killer"
I roll a million sided dice a million times and I am shocked when it rolls a 1. "There was nothing I could do!" I exclaim.
It's fascinating the way our brains autocorrect almost-guaranteed to guaranteed becuase of the fact that it 'should' go off the way we want it to
Unless my math is wrong you've got like 35% chance of avoiding the 1 entirely in that scenario.
@Theottree this is literally the 2 Random numbers vs 1 Random numbers issue in Fire Emblem. We see a 90% to hit and assume 100% in our minds. With 1rn the odds are 90% as displayed, but with 2rn the odds are secretly closer to 98% instead which makes it feel right. The various FE games spent some time flip-flopping and experimenting with what system to use, but it's the arguably most "honest" games with a full 1rn system get the reputation for Random bullshit.
Our brain loves sloppy shortcuts but math is a cold bitch.
Variance is when my Variance Wrynn reveals 3 spells instead of minions. Yeah
True
Also when my Mad Bomber (I went first) kills enemy 1-drop and hits enemy face 2 times in Arena (I just won)
@@Theottree couldn't be me
Great video. I listened to you on some podcast months and months ago and was impressed particularly by you. Although I was disappointed to see you had less than 5 videos I do respect how well thought out and detailed your videos are. Do hope these continue.
Awesome video Theo. Wasn't sure what to expect from your videos, but your tone is great, the editing is solid, the content is presented well and overall just made for an awesome little case study. Looking forward to more videos!
double plus good video. Excellent analysis of both the case study and the larger factor of the forms in which agency appears in these games
But have you considered the fact that i feel bad that the dice roll wasnt in my favor?
I really like these videos, even if they are shorter, i enjoy the way you make your arguments ❤❤❤
I have never played Darkest Dungeon, and therefore am not able to offer my opinion on this game, as I don't understand the games mechanics. But what I can recognize is the quality of this video, and the nuanced, measured perspective that allows someone like me to have at least some idea of what's going on without ever playing this game. Great vid, made me want to check out a game I've never heard of before.
Throw Joseph into the Darkest of Dungeons!
Yea i never liked Josephs dd 1 video. I remember checking if point blank shot did more then 75% of hellion health. It doesn't, just 69%.
So if he did some of the "tedious" prep work as you mention he would been fine. Heck I have done 0 death run with all bosses, but most of it was preppering for each location and bosses. What he called busy work.
But this video have given me some insight how I should look at rng besides darkest dungeon. At very least think before yelling "I had no options"
Cool to see another video this early after the elden ring one.
I am curious about your overall opinion on DD 1 dlcs.
I think The Crimson Court is excellent and essentially 'completes' the base game. I think the extra wrinkles it adds to the gameplay loop do a great job of throwing more wrenches into the player's ability to 'control' everything. Between the curse, invitations, blood supply, timeliness of clearing the court quests (which itself allows some other characters like the Jester to shine due to his proficiency at long-term sustain), even The Fanatic and whatnot. Its bosses and enemies are dangerous and creative, and the entire audiovisual design of the crimson court and its denizens is a straight home run.
The Colour of Madness is also pretty good on the whole; I'm not all that interested in an 'endless mode', but it is unintrusive, has value even in a 'regular' playthrough, and introduces some really neat enemy types in the form of the husks, and the extra spinning plate of the Thing from the Stars, who is really fucking scary and is worth avoiding or planning around. I think the endless mode is cool on its own merits, even if I'm not all that invested in trying to minmax it, personally. Also a very neat aesthetic - decidedly a bit less so than the Crimson Court though. Very good music.
Butcher's Circus I quite liked; I played a decent bit of PvP in it, and found it to be pretty enjoyable. Not the best balanced or most robust of systems, but it was enjoyable enough to dig around in for a while, trying various compositions to see what sort of stuff would work and what would not. Also kinda fascinating to see it as a sort of 'prelude' to DD2's gameplay w/ stuff like Daze.
And finally I guess the Shieldbreaker. Shieldbreaker is maybe my favourite class in the game, so maybe that speaks for itself lol
On the whole I think DD1's DLCs only ever enhanced the game, but the really big one is the Crimson Court. I don't necessarily think you should use it for a first playthrough, but after that, it really does make the game whole.
@Theottree The content in itself is good, the blood vile resource management in particular fits perfectly it feels like it was there from the beginning, but I don't know if it's integration within the campaign's progress is as good as it could have been.
From my experience I found myself completely avoiding the new areas until like half of the playthough. Not because it's too hard, you can play around the hazards eatch area introduces without too much problem, but because
1. I don't find the challenges of said obstacles engaging. The thing from the stars is so scary that it eitheir basically banishes one area eatch week or forces you to take a big risk until you are in a confident position to both face it and afford to heal the stress you will necessarely suffer. And the mosquitos spawning in every single area just becomes redundant, specially because the mosquitos don't feel that much unique compared to other mobs in the base game.
2. I don't think the rewards are worth the trouble during the early game. It's not lile the reduction of stress heal is that big of a pain. And the districts are too expensive for me to consider them worth saving for until the late game.
So I don't feel incentivized towards taking the DLC content as an organic part of my progress in the campaign, more like a side challenge for when I am already in a comfortable position.
Look at you makin videos. Great stuff. I've never played DD, but your video was comprehensive and easy to understand. I look forward to more videos. You are a true Longman.
Curious is the critique maker's art.
The only time I had a situation where I couldn't do anything in my 240 hours of playtime was where a Chevalier did Subterranean Skewer, landed crit on my Hellion for full hp, applied bleed and then it was Hellion's turn and the bleed damage tick killed her at a Death's Door instantly.
These instances happen, but people seem to ignore when they get lucky.
What ye mean?! When i critted that eldritch horror with a 46% leper hit on my last action. Wasn't luck, aint no fluke, pure skill and calculated to bitter end. Ah my team died anyways.....
Yeah, stuff like this happens, but it is cosmically rare. We are talking RNG on hit chance of Skewer, RNG on bleed% vs Bleed res%, RNG on damage range of the attack, then we have other 3 heroes that threw their speed dice next round and all landed lower than Helion, despite her having death’s door debuff, and then finally Death’s door RNG for her to die.
People hear stories like these and project them on their own gameplay, where they leave stress casters alive, cheap out on provisions, and come to conclusion that “suddenly dying” in DD is just a thing that happens.
While I generally agree with the points here, I will play the other side for a moment, and I do have a bit of a point to make by it. Because, it absolutely is possible to get simply terribly unlucky. I have next to no experience with Darkest Dungeon, but I do know about TTRPGs, and I'll be the first to tell you that encounters can absolutely go sideways-even when played as best as possible-when the dice misbehave. It is a simple possibility that, with a large enough sample-size of rolls, you will occasionally run-into encounters where everything you do fails and everything the enemy does succeeds, even when doing your best to maximize a positive outcome.
However, I will circle this back around to the positive angle that simply is risk. One of the big appeals of tabletop is that good decisions can go horribly wrong, and bad decisions can somehow have a ludicrously positive outcome, as this fits the immersive nature of the game. Sometimes that pillar really might be unstable enough to drop on the boss; on the other hand, even an experienced rogue might slip-up while disarming a trap. It all creates circumstances that have to be dealt with uniquely. Sometimes these do tend to stack-up and snowball at rates they, statistically speaking, shouldn't, but that's just part of the tradeoff of this feature.
There's also the simple reality... and this may not be universal, but when everything's always going right, it tends not to be as fun. Without RNG, the game either has to genuinely outsmart you or pull something totally unpredictable and/or unfair to change things. However, RNG allows all manner of ways to shake things up without essentially cheating. If instead of a certainty, you have an array of possible outcomes, then it becomes possible for the player to weigh them, choose the risks they find most suitable, and possibly even prepare to mitigate a bad result. A player might, for instance, have to chose between an all-or-nothing risk case and a safer, more predictable trade.
This can, once again, create unfair circumstances-sometimes that safer trade might end-up costing you in the long-run, as the HP you wasted is sorely missed later... but the all-or-nothing risk might've also been even worse had it backfired. In which case, neither would've been the correct option. I am simply unprepared to make an assertion about whether this kind of circumstance is possible in Darkest Dungeon, or whether mitigation/outright prevention of it is a desirable outcome, but I do want to give mention to it nonetheless.
This all being said, I'm not entirely sure if it's wrong for a game to have the potential for unfair outcomes in the first place. Maybe I'm projecting a bit, but I don't think most people play permadeath games or challenges (Ironman/Nuzlocke runs) to never lose anyone-sure, a perfect survival rate may be the goal, but if you're consistently able to produce that result... then it would begin to feel as if the feature/challenge didn't exist. That is, of course, a bit of an adjacent point when we're discussing RNG in general, but I think it still bears some mentioning.
Well stated! I’d like to see an analysis through your lens on Rain World, whether it be its mechanics, RNG or difficulty.
Certainly in the pipeline. Rain World is a game I'm very excited to talk about.
Theo is going for the 👑!!! May he destroy all video essayists and their preambles with this swing of his literary sword!
When it comes to RNG, the problem is not that it exists, but WHERE in the event chain it occurs. You want it to happen earlier, so that the player can reliably predict the outcome of actions.
Slay the Spire is a good comparison (glad you mentioned it). You have similar type of combat, and the game has loads of randomness. But the player has many options when dealing with it, from using potions at the right time, to buying (or not) more potions, artifacts, or other cards from shops. Or what cards to add/remove to the deck.
Main difference is that in Slay the Spire, all the RNG occurs earlier in the chain. Attacks are telegraphed to you, and it tells you EXACTLY how much damage they do. All effects do what they say, without any randomness. This allows you to make more precise decisions. Where as in DD, the RNG occurs AFTER you have committed to a decision, such as how much damage an enemy attack does, does it crit, does Death's Door kill you, does a stun actually work, etc......
The short version is this - RNG that randomizes how your attacks play out is generally bad, proportional to how much difference there is between best case and worst case. So an attack that does 15-20 damage is fine, where as one that does 5-30 would be much worse. RNG that occurs BEFORE that will usually be good.
As for "accouting for enemy damage", how are you supposed to account for an attack that does 1-40 damage (exaggerating for effect)? By assuming that it will deal 40? THAT is what Joe called "boring and tedious".
Hope this all makes sense. Cheers. Glad you are still posting, and that your Elden Ring video didn't get you torched by the FROM community.
Why is RNG earlier in the chain necessarily bad, though? I understand that we end up with more variance and swingier variance, but as Darkest Dungeon shows amongst many other games of its type, better players find far more frequent and consistent success than worse players. I appeal to this because it shows something about the player's ability to account for the variance present in the game, even in an unabashedly swingy game like Darkest Dungeon.
Furthermore I think it is worth respecting that Darkest Dungeon is a game that is actively built to be swingy in this way - it is playing into core pillars like stress around which the game is designed.
To me RNG tends to only become problematic when it is actively infringing upon player agency. I think a degree of this is arguable with Darkest Dungeon, but it's pretty clear that the game is very, very clearly winnable - the variance only really goes crazy on Torchless, where the first few weeks especially are a bit of a shitfest, and there are many heroes who cannot be run simply because they are too squishy to be reliable in the face of random crit-spikes and whatnot. But I think it is fair to describe this as outside of the game's usual balance parameters - it is strictly an optional challenge mode.
The point I'm trying to get at is that I'm down to concede that Darkest Dungeon can be a very swingy game - that's built in. I just think it takes more justification to describe that level of variance as bad, when it does not appear to meaningfully infringe upon player decisions in the majority of cases, and it is working in service of something the game is doing. If I was going after a game for its variance I'd probably go after Inscryption's Kaycee's Mod. At harder difficulties especially you're left heavily at the mercy of variance in a way that is very difficult to control for in any meaningful way. Alternatively, there's always the lay-up of Hearthstone lol
Regarding accounting for enemy damage, I don't think you have to always expect the 40, nor do I think you can fully account for such a swingy attack - but what you can absolutely do is think about what the possible results are, and how you can account for those results, if at all. If it becomes clear that there's really nothing you can do in the even that it rolls 40, then you shouldn't play to shore up against rolling a 40. Sometimes the enemy will roll a 40 and you won't be able to do anything about it, and maybe this means you lose - but this can happen in Spire too. Think about fights against Nemesis. Say you're Ironclad and have Disarm, the variance between it doing a multiattack and a big attack is enormous, and your ability to do anything about either is somewhat dictated to you by your draw order. To say nothing of thin decks and multiple burn adds putting you in terrible spots. This is all extremely swingy, despite the intent system - and you have to be thinking ahead about what *could* happen before you actually see the intent, or your draw. In many ways this is not that dissimilar to Darkest Dungeon.
Ty for the reply, sorry for the followup wall lol
@@Theottree No worries at all. I'm glad that you care enough to respond.
As far as the game being designed to be swingy, Joseph did say that the devs succeeded in making the game they wanted to. Just that, as an actual experience, it was miserable. Partly due to the Permadeath, which meant that, in addition to losing the fight, you might have to grind for hours to get back to that point.
Imagine if in Slay the Spire, a really bad loss could set you back 2 Ascension levels - That would be truly awful.
I suspect this is going to come down to taste. For anyone who like the kind of RNG and swinginess of DD, well, I can't really argue with that. My tolerance for that just isn't as high. Your comment of "being punished for making the right play" is very accurate - that feels really awful.
I am reminded of Xcom Enemy Unknown (2012 release), which felt quite similar. You could sometimes get blindsided by something really unlucky, and part of the fun was making plans ahead of time to account for it. It could be thrilling - but also frustrating. Like when an enemy hits you in full cover, and rolls highest number, AND a crit, killing your guy instantly.......good times....
Also Hearthstone........the only proof you need that HS is fucked is that they printed a card that reads: 10 mana - cast 10 RANDOM spells. As in, from any class.
And this was apparently acceptable.......
Cheers, mate. Perhaps you will be our new Matthematosis - a Chap with a lovely voice offering smooth and balanced critique.
Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel have attacks that do 1-20 damage, and they even have attacks that do 1-20 damage twice, and they have attacks that deal 1-20 damage 5 times at maximum. They also have other modifiers that increase damage by flat amounts, increase crit chance, increase hit chance, and many other more minor effects, after you start using weapon mods. These are widely held to be possibly the best Star Wars games of all time, and among the best Western RPGs of all time.
They just also have much higher health pools, so average damage per attack is much more important, because you pretty much have to try to get into a situation where the most extreme of extreme bad RNG will actually kill you, because even the highest possible damage amounts are still less than your hit point total, and you have other resources aside, including flat damage absorption and ablation. The randomness is not a problem because included as part of the design is a large degree of control over randomness and mitigation of the effect of randomness. Even in the absolute worst case scenario where you just fail RNG checks consecutively during normal gameply for 2 minutes straight through no fault of your own whatsoever (something that I don't believe has happened to literally anybody ever, or would if we gave a billion people until the heat death of the universe to encounter it, given how unlikely it is), it's still fine because the consequences are just reloading to the last checkpoint or save, which probably happened about 10 minutes ago.
@@brofist1959 Generally, you can mitigate RNG by spreading it into more, but smaller events. So, one attack that deals 1-20 damage FIVE times, is much better than one that does 5-100 damage ONCE. Because the distribution will be much more towards the middle, and the edge cases will be VERY rare.
@@TheFuzzician That's true, but more importantly is that the impact of RNG is continuously mitigated despite there being so incredibly much RNG. My point is that something dealing 1-40 damage isn't bad inherently, it's bad within a wider context. It's fine in KotOR, it probably wouldn't be in Darkest Dungeon, and this context is precisely why I think Mr. Anderson isn't necessarily wrong in principle about the RNG of DD not being particularly enjoyable for most people, and dare I say it, it may even be pretty poorly designed.
I will say, it is annoying when RNG does go... sideways. A "fun" recent example I got from last year was when I was playing Baldur's Gate 3. I went to speak to a friendly npc in a friendly zone early on, so I wasn't expecting a fight. Well, story stuff happens, fight starts. I actually thought the outcome was scripted because of how badly it went for me. I didn't even get a single action before the enemy force sniped a key character and I was greeted with a... rather unfortunate cutscene. I was about to praise the devs for such a bold decision when I realized just how many quests I had set up that failed in that moment. Decided to load and low and behold, it wasn't scripted. I just got stupid unlucky.... and not quite as but still pretty damn unlucky the next three times I attempted the fight.
Was there "Nothing" I could have done? No, there were definitely some things which could have helped. Even in the scenario where I was not expecting the fight (Various potions and things which last until your next long rest or even having a different party composition that had an additional quick acting character). That said, it does make me wonder at what point is is the player not accounting for reasonable variables, bud luck, or bad design? Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
Most of the things you could have done would need your knowledge of what is possible, and accounting for possible outcomes can break immersion.
Just as a first time DD player wont know which corridor has how much % chance to spawn what enemy that has what % chance of isntakilling you at your current light level
@@texteel True. The annoying thing is I had some knowledge on attempts 2, 3, and 4, one of which involved a lot of furniture shuffling before the fight, but for whatever reason I just couldn't stop them from sniping that character. Also, I assume BG3 player's who've done this scene will know which I'm talking about. Mainly just not giving deets to avoid spoiling.
But yeah, it did pull me a bit out of the game as I ultimately decided to hold off talking to this npc, therefore preventing the fight, until I had leveled and explored a bit. Annoying because it meant I had to explore with a handicap initially given plot stuff.
Eventually went back to the fight and got it dealt with, and even despite the enemies being trivial, it was annoying how close it was just because of said npc coming close to getting dropped from what few attacks that did make it through.
2:30 The real issue is that Joseph didn't have any agency at the enemy's turn. If the enemy didn't take their turn, no such bad luck is possible.
Something tells me that this bit is about having the wrong expectations rolling into a game you know has these RNG elements and not factoring them in to your decisions. The clip where Joseph says his bit is that he's even frustrated that he has to play carefully - when that's literally what the RPG elements of the game are about. It's almost like Joseph refuses to take games seriously or something, based on clips of what I've seen of his game streams and his reviews.
I would also point out that Joseph was apparently supposed to have factored in RNG to such an extent that his every decision needs to be questioned. And that’s where the issue lies.
There just comes a point where RNG is so unmanageable that it feels like a wall. And this moment where Joseph loses his character with no chance of reversing it?
THATS the stuff that would piss me off. So he switches up the characters. Would his crusader have been able to endure 32 hp of damage and not have triggered the death door?
Even still, his crusader would have been taking a total of 39 damage on turn 1. That would have his healer spamming healing to salvage the situation, on top of the plague doctor needing to buff the healer with speed so they could hopefully get in front of the damage.
Because the healer lost in terms of speed on BOTH enemies.
So immediately, with one turn, Joseph would be on the back foot in both situations.
I am factoring Darkest Dungeon's RNG elements into my decision to not play the game. I don't mind a bit of RNG, but I am entirely opposed to such a heavy emphasis on it with incredibly cruel punishments for failing dice rolls. Sure, perhaps he could have made a different decision in this specific scenario that would have lead to a different result, but his different decisions could also have failed the RNG check, and we would end up back in this spot. It's fine if failing an RNG check results in a punishment, but I'm not interested in spending hours grinding to get back to where I was.
@@nhagan001 It's not the outcome, it's what Joseph took from it.
He had a situation where the RNG screwed him and in his review his conclusion drawn was "There should be less RNG." His mindset was in the wrong place because he didn't take the game seriously.
When you get into the details and the numbers, then, the argument could have been that the game was too difficult, and so would become a discussion on what difficulty Joseph played at, what would be considered reasonable numbers, as well as what is a reasonable margin of error, and all that. Because if it really was such an oppressive scenario, then an argument can be made about how the devs balanced the numbers at higher difficulties.
But that's not what he said. The issue is that Joseph did not enter that state of post-battle analysis and assessed what he was doing and what the game gave him. He just went "Aw dang it" and said he preferred what would be essentially a different game because "if there was less RNG he'd have more agency" or something along those lines. That's the issue here, beyond any tangential questions of "was Joseph playing well or not" because again that's always balanced against the numbers the game gave him. The issue is that he hates being served those numbers, "fair" or not, "difficult" or not.
@@afelias no no, the RNG didnt screw him over. He didn’t “manage his risk” enough.
He should have known that the room he was rolling into had two enemies that were going to crit and death door the front character.
He should have anticipated having no control of the situation. Plan around not being able to walk as a cripple.
And that’s where the issue comes in. Eventually you go from desiring the positive outcome to “hopefully” crossing out enough negative outcomes to have a least one leg to limp out of the dungeon with.
Eventually you go from risk management to “I better know percentages of every outcome at every time.” Babysitting RNG at every moment.
It’s no longer a desire to win, it’s not losing to the possible “rolled a 1 in DnD” in the most crucial moments.
@@nhagan001 You're just doing the same thing there, you're not taking the game seriously. "It's no longer a desire to win, it's not losing"? That is the whole point of success and failure states in a game. If you "don't lose" long enough, you win. Fighting games are a long series of matches where you lose less HP than your opponent, over a series of rounds. If you "don't lose" enough rounds, you win a game.
RNG mitigation is a massive aspect in a ton of speedruns that can be done consistently by skilled and knowledgeable players.
This is a banger.
Had a lot of such moments playing Noita recently, also an rng-heavy roguelike.
So many deaths feel like were out of my control as they happened, something going wrong and leading to death in seconds. But as the frustration passes and if I take a moment to think about what happened, it becomes obvious how much of my choices led to me dying, especially not being careful enough because I got comfortable with things going smooth.
I personally really like external variance, but despise internal variance. Essentially things like "what will the enemies do", "what is the battle map", "what cards will I be dealt at the start of the turn? (sts)" are really fun. But things like "Once I click this card on an enemy, it will do 2-6 damage randomly", or "when I click this enemy, I have 50/50 chance to miss and do nothing" are infuriating. I'm not even sure if there's a fundamental difference between the two but one just feels way better to interact with specifically because it instills a higher level of agency in me. It makes me feel like I'm a competent controlled entity fighting external chaos, rather than fighting against myself.
I wonder if you categorize these types of variance separately as well.
I don't really articulate a distinction of that kind myself, but I know I've felt that frustration with lowrolling attack numbers or missing or what have you. However to me it feels very much similar in character to the frustration I feel in Slay the Spire when I open all block cards on a debuff turn, or all attack cards on a big attack turn.
Hey yo! Great vid.
Two minutes in, and I think the biggest problem with J.A's situation is that he forgot the number one rule of games where characters can permanently die.
He didn't play around the crit.
That’s the last thing on the list of errors there. At what point is it fine to stop blaming poor encounter design, and ok to start blaming players for not paying attention and misunderstanding the game?
If the player tries to zerg rush the boss, and he kills him before he can do it-is it bad game design, because boss’s numbers are bigger than player numbers, or is it the player’s fault, because he played recklessly?
Edit: Changed my mind
Tbh I think besides not eating the food beforehand Joseph made the most strategically sound decision he could have. Immediately brute forcing an enemy at the get-go reduces their damage by nearly 33%. He could have just as easily lost a hero because the 3 enemies attack the same hero. I think its a little unfair to retroactively say "well you could have done this" when doing that could also have lost him a hero. He's not downplaying his agency he's not understanding how he should have played differently. Part of the problem is so many of the probability numbers aren't communicated. Most numbers are invisible
I don't think his play was terrible by any means, if I came off that way that's not what I meant. But it's pretty undeniable to me that he didn't respect the potential danger that room posed and just sorta went on autopilot. Against the majority of other enemy groups his play is fine, but this play in this spot leaves him very vulnerable to some really really dangerous spots due to Point Blank Shot. I don't think it is strategically sound to not adequately respect that danger. I'm not trying to argue from a post-hoc sense. I don't think you need foresight into the future to acknowledge that your Hellion has a small chance of being in some real danger.
Again tho, his play isn't bad - it's just rigid. He is deeply concerned with hero loss but is not playing in a way that respects the possibility of a hero loss. I think there are other lines that make that remote possibility even more remote if that possibility is acknowledged.
Also fwiw it's not necessarily true to say that killing an enemy reduces the enemy party's damage by 33% or so; this will probably be the case sometimes, but it depends on enemy composition. Killing the Fusilier saves a lot of HP probably over the course of the fight, but it doesn't save *important* HP in a sense, if we think in terms of the potential Hellion death. Divine Comfort from the Vestal on a few stall turns or after the alpha strike handily deals with whatever the Fusilier puts out.
@@Theottree Fair enough
I am by no means a DD expert but I reckon whatever he did to reduce the whipper to half should have been a stun.
Either it was one swing crit which then most of the time provides much less value (as 3/4 whip dude still needs roughly two strong and one weak attack to go down simmilar to full health) or he spent whopping two actions to damage him which is just plain wasteful.
I'd rate this video essay a 7/10
Consider me a new subscriber.
7/10 just enough water
Pokemon nuzlockers have known for years that you just gotta play around the critical hit 🤷♂️
Like wise with ironman runs in fire emblem
been waiting for months since it was mentioned, finally 😈
Follow up comment: Good video Theo. I enjoyed the discussion.
I know it doesn't say much, but it still should be said. Looking forward to the next one.
The negative RNG isn't presented as categorically bad, it's when mixed with the permadeath and grindy aspect of the game that means that said bad RNG, instead of putting you back a couple of minute before when you last saved, richer with the experience acquired and lesson learned, means that you're going to be spending a few hours to level another of that character with the frustration that this entails.
Your point that there are steps he could've taken to prevent it is moot because it just falls into the former point that the game encourages you to play in a boringly careful fashion and punishes experimenting.
Your whole point about stuns is largely correct however, I don't think arguing that a player is in the wrong for not following the meta is a stance anyone would want to take. It'd be like me saying that your complaints about Radahn's combo being undodgeable is invalid because you should have summons that are going to draw his aggro and you should have been running X/Y/Z build that would've killed Radahn in 13.5 seconds preventing him from using that blow in the first place anyway. It's technically correct, it is something you can do to prevent the problem from happening but we're losing focus of the original criticism (not to mention it being a horrible argument in general): that being the layers of RNG in addition to the perma-death and grindy-ness of the game discourages a manner of playing which JA finds interesting. A part of his video outright states that the devs absolutely achieved their goals with the game and that he just finds the end result unfun and, imo, he fairly demonstrated why.
Now I get that the central thesis of your video is that players tend to downplay their own decision-making when there are easy external factors to point to and blame instead but to make an ER comparison again, this is like saying that players shouldn't have a problem dodging Waterfowl Dance as it is absolutely dodgeable (even without tricking her AI into going the wrong way or sprinting away) instead of pointing out that the animations of the move do not communicate its hitboxes clearly. Both stances are true and devaluing one in favor of the other just seems very limiting.
Interesting video nonetheless.
Bringing up Elden Ring is a great point. How much does Theo talk about “telegraphing” being important for a boss? A boss with limitless stamina and heal catching? Irregular combo attacks that go from 3 to 6 to 4?
I wonder what Theo would think of Elden Ring if it was as RNG as DD?
Debuffs chance to resist? Never 100% guaranteed sword strikes? Chance of your healing being denied? The enemy getting two free attacks on your before your allowed to move?
I don't think it's true that the game encourages you to play 'boringly careful' though. I've done plenty of experimenting - it's how I ended up good at the game. I don't really disagree that Darkest Dungeon could be considered overly grindy; I think that's a perfectly fair problem to raise. And I don't at all disagree that losing characters you invested a lot into is frustrating - it absolutely is and absolutely should be. I just don't think the game is at fault for occasionally harshly punishing negligence. If you could just reload back a bit, or got your character back in short order, it would deprive the experience of some of its peaks and valleys. You can experiment and mess around with compositions plenty if you want to, you just have to play the game well subsequently. Alternatively, you can put less stock in your heroes - you certainly do not need an exact roster to clear the game on Bloodmoon. Losing a Hellion sucks, Hellions are really good - but the loss of a Hellion does not then mandate that you immediately recruit and focus on training up a new one. This is not necessary. I understand why a player would want to, but I think it is important to recognise that the game is readily beatable without doing so.
I will say that this video was made before Red Hook made some changes to the game to reduce the degree of grind. Like I said, I think there's some validity to the point, but I don't think permadeath or variance play into that point really at all.
For the Elden Ring comparisons, I don't think they map well. I'm not encouraging Joseph to play 'meta', as such, in the same way as someone telling another player to pop Mimic Tear. I'm not asking him to respec, or use anything outside of his current toolkit, or really do anything differently other than a slight change in approach in a singular instance to better account for the current gamestate. If he replied that he doesn't want to use stuns or thinks they make the play experience worse, I'd probably want to pursue that logic a bit, but it's not material - that's fine. However he has the stuns equipped on his bar and from the looks of things had them on his bar for the whole game more or less. He seems aware of the power of stuns even if they go unmentioned, and he seems not to be shy about using them. He chose not to in this scenario. And it's not as if the enemy behaviour is inscrutable in the way that a player's possible responses to Waterfowl might be. This is a Champion dungeon; Joseph has undoubtedly seen a bunch of Bloodletters at this point, and is undoubtedly aware of Point Blank Shot as a move. He knows that what happened *could* happen, somewhere in his mind - but his play doesn't reflect that reality. He has all the information but did not use it, as opposed to an Elden Ring telegraphing scenario in which the player just doesn't have the information until they've seen the attack come out several times. This is less of an issue for a game with a structure like Darkest Dungeon, because it is built with the reality that you'll see the same enemies many many times in mind.
I am aware Joseph was making a different point here than criticising RNG. I take his words on RNG throughout the video to be strictly negative; he doesn't have anything good to say about the presence of variance, and he has plenty of negative. But here he's talking about the grind, which, like I said, might have some validity to it though I disagree with how Joseph articulates it. I just found the particular phrasing here to be a very strong demonstration of how we work in terms of agency and blame and fixed thought processes regarding variance.
Sorry for the wall of text lol, ty for watching
@@Theottree Wall of texts are great, don't apologize for making 'em
I think the game absolutely does encourage playing overly carefully as a beginner which is the experience Joe was describing. Obviously somebody with deep knowledge of the mechanics, information acquired from outside of the game (such as certain hidden values etc) and a wealth of experience to draw on will play in a different manner but I don't know at which point it's fair to invoke that particular person's point of view in favor of a new player's.
I agree that losing a character should be frustrating in that kind of game but there is a discussion to be had on how quickly you should be able to lose one and what that particularly entails for your run. If I lose a really good sniper in x-com I can just level another up relatively painlessly by putting him in a "safe team", essentially getting carried by higher level units which is rewarding me for my previous plays (i.e keeping enough units alive that I don't start from the bottom again) and is overall speeding up the process greatly. In return the loss I feel for losing said scout is the pain of losing a character I've lived through potentially dozens of missions with and who has, more likely than not, saved my ass an untold amount of time: it's the end of a diagetic narrative and it's, to my sense, more than enough punishment for a poor play when added to the mechanical loss.
I don't think "you can beat the game without doing X" is really a solid argument, there are plenty of challenge runs out there for all kinds of games that are out of what would be reasonable to expect of a player but still did complete the game, but that's besides the point I'd make: the game does train you into feeling more comfortable with certain strong units as a new player and does seem to punish experimentation, as a new player will not have the necessary knowledge to "play well" since that knowledge requires experimentation which in turn will set your run back by quite a bit feeding into a negative feedback loop until you acquire the "skills" (in this case skill being knowledge based instead of mechanical). The mechanical loop of the game encourages a new player to find some teams (or at least a few team cores) he's comfortable with and to only stick to those as it is the best way for them to make nearly surefire progress. Obviously I'm not going to say that this is the only way to play the game but I do think it's important to recognize that this is a behavior the game is very likely to reinforce for a new player that doesn't bother looking for outside ressources (videos/guides/streams about the game).
The elden ring comparison were mostly hyperbole to make my point stand-out and I could probably rephrase them dozens of ways around your response to make the square fit into the circle hole but that would be silly: I was mostly making the point that suggesting a playstyle change in retrospect that would have accounted for mild chances is different from pointing out mechanical flaws in the playstyle at any given moment. The logic you used could be extrapolated into "he made the wrong choice bringing X/Y units to Z dungeon" which could be extrapolated into "he made the wrong choice building X/Y units this way instead of Z way" and so on and so forth which can be fair points in some cases but I don't really know if it applies here. As you pointed out what happened to him was extremely unlucky and though I don't want to bother calculating the chances, we settle on him having "failed" 4 33% rolls back to back (That particular skill coming out, then criting, then the second enemy selecting that same target and then the character failing the death's door check), that comes out at around 1.2% chances of something happening which, imo, is unlikely enough to consider it reasonable for a player to not take into account as a possibility when making plans, in fact I'd consider someone making preparations for such a situation to be completely insane -and not in the sense "insane at the video game"-.
As an aside, if you want to see the RNG blaming behavior in full effect, I suggest you take a look at morrowind's combat and its reputation. A simple hitchance based combat with relatively straight-forward mechanics (hitting is harder when you're tired, hitting is harder with a weapon you're not skilled in, hitting is harder if the enemy is good at defending) has lead the vast majority of the people who try it to consider it an inherently flawed system instead of considering that maybe they were just playing the game wrong (and I do mean playing the game wrong). Pretty interesting stuff to see happening.
@@nhagan001 I don't think your points in particular as espsecially valid given the difference in genre. Debuff chance resists are represented in the form of resistance in ER whilst hitchance is represented in the form of the player's accuracy when making a strike. You, the player, don't whiff an attack in DD much in the same way that your character doesn't miss an attack that you the player hit in ER. There's also a fact to consider that the implementation of such RNG in Elden Ring would inherently mean that the player ought to benefit from it in some ways but at this point we're changing the genre of the game from action to RPG.
@@naunau311 in ER, you can make your ability to overcome resistances and accuracy with much more certainty than in DD. Can you not upgrade yourself, your weapons, or use items to get over the obstacles of the mentioned factors?
In DD, you have to devote turns to reducing the high resistances and evasion to then implement your desired outcome. Theo brings up the Spiders and their speed and evasion abilities.
Take for instance the chance to stun in DD:
You have to score on accuracy, then score against evasion, then overcome resistance chance and your resistance trigger.
In ED, you apply your buffs to yourself to mitigate all these factors at your leisure. The distance from a boss lets you apply effects with chance to evade if you’re interrupted.
Fail the stun in DD because of accuracy, evasion, or resistance, and there is no rolling away from the consequences.
Fail to debuff in ED? And you GTFO to get your bearings.
Great video!
My feedback remains the same, some sort of subtle ambient background track during the commentary sections would help enhance the videos, I feel.
Quite the polite way to tell someone they have a skill issue! Jokes aside, I experienced something similar when xenonauts 2 first released into EA. As soon as chance is involved people just can not except when they play poorly.
While I generally agree with most of your points, there are some interesting counterpoints to RNG in games. I will mainly use Slay the Spire(Henceforth StS) for my examples because it is in your examples as well, and I'm more familiar with it than darkest dungeon.
Let me preface this with - I think RNG is a necessary component for a lot of games for 2 reasons:
1. Replayability - This one does not need much explaining just imagine how boring StS would be without random card draws / routes / shops / enemies.
2. Skill level - Games without RNG like say chess have everything dependent on your skill which diminishes the ability of new player to win the game. Hence before even starting the game one knows that unless they git gud there is no chance of winning. For many this is the factor which deters them from learning the game in the first place. No one likes to feel stupid for hours on end. That is not to say chess is bad it has other mechanism to vary difficulty like opponent skill level, but even chess had dice in it at its conception.
Now to the main course. Here are a couple of counter arguments to RNG in games.
1. Meta knowledge - While some may attribute it to skill RNG often introduces knowledge that user can not gain from the game itself that can alter your win chances. In StS the famous example is first floor fight. If you know how game RNG works after seeing the first floor enemy you can know if a question mark floor right after is or isn't a fight, which can influence your decision. Again for some this is skill to others having external knowledge is unfair. Thankfully StS unlike GeoGuessr doesn't require you to have that knowledge to be good at the game.
2. Lack of clarity - You did mention this briefly, but I would like to delve deeper on this point, because it's my main gripe with RNG in games. You did say that it's hard to know which action led to your loss in the end, but my main problem is it might not have been any of your choices. There are 100% proven unwinable seeds in StS and that makes me doubt that any of my actions even CAN improve my chances. It might be, all I'm doing is waiting for milk to spoil to win at slot machines. Obviously, one can point at a higher win percentage and say they are improving, but unless someone replays all your seeds you might not know if you just got lucky that many times and got runs that are just destined to win. It's not a surprise that a lot of cheaters in speedruns turn to manipulating RNG as their main strategy because its next to impossible to prove.
Anyway, this rant cannot have a conclusion, so I'll end here. Liked the the video, very interesting topic. Keep up the good work.
Something that I think is going unmentioned here that I believe is vitally important to variance and its place within games is that management of odds-based or variance-involving systems is a form of skill expression all of its own that *requires* the presence of variance, or RNG, to exist. RNG doesn't just allow a newer or less skilled player to win sometimes by highrolling, it creates the conditions for completely different forms of skill to be expressed in the forms of maximising one's percentage-points against the odds - reducing vulnerability to low rolls where possible, and reducing reliance on high rolls to attain victory. In addition to adding replayability and variety to a game experience, they test the strength and *flexibility* of one's decision-making.
Funnily enough with Spire, that's specifically an issue of the game *not* being 'random' enough. Slay the Spire generates its seeds with corrolated RNG, which allows observations about the following floors based on the first fight due to how it generates its values. Many players and streamers, knowing this, opt to play with a mod to remove the corollated RNG, while also encouraging others to not 'explain' the system to players who cannot so that they are not then aware of it in a way that will affect their play regardless of if they consciously choose to capitalise on it or not.
I also want to mention that only one seed that I know of in Spire has been determined as mathematically unwinnable. There are others that are up in the air - but to determine if they're winnable or not involves all sorts of considerations and checks that don't actually involve playing well at Slay the Spire. I don't think checking for unwinnability is ever really a good way to go with these sorts of games, as the majority of the time, the information needed to determine if a gamestate is unwinnable in a game involving randomness will not be available to a player playing normally within the confines of the game. Ofc it becomes a problem if a game is proving consistently mathematically unwinnable despite good play, but I don't know of a game that is provably doing that.
I do though tend to agree broadly that many games of this sort could do with providing a bit more information to the player about what enemy capabilities are, at the very least once the player has seen that enemy/that attack. In an ideal world, I'd not have to go to the wiki to find the exact damage range and crit chance of Point Blank Shot - I'd just be able to see it. I think there is a potential slippery slope with information overload as opposed to the player having to work outside the game for pertinent knowledge to their decisions, but that's a fuzzy, fuzzy slope. For an example of a game that does a great job of giving you information though, Into the Breach's enemies behave with a considerable degree of variance - but the game tells you their available tiles, their attacks and their properties, the order of actions (including DoT and environmental effects), and much much more. It's an impressive feat of clarity.
What I more meant with the point regarding clarity is that due to the nature of variance, it's very hard to determine which decision, set of decisions, or even theoretical approach to decision points, is the cause for lower success rates. I could watch Jorbs, or Xecnar, or Baalor play a run of the spire and win it, then load in and play a very similar run and lose - and I may very well not be able to tell which decision points I ran into resulted in my defeat. Whether I misplayed a fight, or if my entire conceptual approach to how I was pathing and what nodes I was choosing and what cards I was taking was incorrect. It takes a lot of skill to be able to assess lines effectively this way, and it's also not conducive to helping the player build up a robust understanding in a quick manner, if at all. I don't know how much these games can be blamed for this - what are they supposed to do, exactly? We can think about all sorts of *potential* triage solutions, things like giving the player access to a full replay of their run or something similar to that, but it is by no means an easy task. Sometimes you make the right play and get punished; sometimes you make the wrong play and get rewarded. The game can't reasonably be said to be doing anything *wrong* in these instances, because if we start curtailing these, we essentially defeat the point of building around variance in the first place.
Hope that addresses everything, cheers for watching and I'm glad you enjoyed :)
Interesting video. I'll admit I don't play very many games with large amounts of variance like this, I just typically don't enjoy having to account for variance to the degree you'd have to account for it in games like Darkest Dungeon. The closest thing I typically end up playing are RPGs with much more standard amounts of swing to them.
Though, this does remind me of something I encountered yesterday playing the demo for Metaphor.
So, that game has some pretty standard JRPG rng swings. Hit chance, crit chance, flee chance. Simple stuff. However, the weirdest thing about the game's combat is that no matter what the battle state is, you can always hit L3 to completely reset the battle. Yep, full reset to the state the player was in at the beginning of the fight. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if the game used the same RNG seed when you reset a battle, but nope. You can, if you so choose, attempt to flee a battle and just reset the battle if you fail. No cost, no limitation (other than not being able to flee during bosses and whatnot). It's also worth mentioning that this was on the hardest difficulty that the demo had available (apparently the full game will have one more difficulty higher), so this wasn't just an option for easy mode.
seeing that, then watching this video, really makes the variance in combat outcomes seem meaningless. The only thing keeping a player from resetting whenever they get a bad rng swing, or not getting a good swing, is the apathy threshold of not wanting to bother trying a battle over and over again.
Just a tangent I thought of. Either way, keep up the good work.
IDK if the 15 minute tangent about not getting ice cream as a child because your mother rolled dice every night for dinner was necessary, but a good video otherwise.
Nightreign response... Immediately.
Still no Lil gull mention smh my head
Lovely video. Might be time for me to buy Darkest Dungeon. I think there’s another conversation to be had about the relationship between game knowledge as part of game skill, since it’s not always treated that way. The way “skill” is used often just makes me think they’re talking about reflexes.
I enjoyed watching this case study. The subject of RNG and player agency is one I've been contemplating quite a bit as I analyze the game design behind the mobile card game Marvel Snap. It's often maligned with the same criticisms presented in this video, where players assert they are placed in unwinnable situations due to no fault of their own. As with Darkest Dungeon, there are certain arrangements that are truly unwinnable, but the game was intentionally designed around such circumstances. Instead of testing a player's ability to simply win as many games as possible, it tests a player's resource management and risk mitigation. The game is structured like poker, where you can bet or fold to either increase the value of the current game or cut your losses and leave. It's why the official mode used for tournaments occurs over multiple matches and gives both players a finite amount of resources. A common criticism of this mode often occurs when a player loses their final match due to a completely unwinnable setup, but to say there's nothing they could have done is to disregard the previous 5-6 matches and the misplays that were made prior.
I don't want to discount the criticism in full, as I figure there is gradation to it. When playing a game like Candy Land, the criticism is justified as there is truly no strategy to grant a player any agency. The player that won would have lost if the starting turn order were rearranged. If we transition to something like Rock, Paper, Scissors, the criticism varies depending on how it's played, as certain conditions can introduce opportunities for skill expression. However, even the greatest RPS player of all time can still lose to a complete novice very easily, something that couldn't be said about a game like chess. What I tend to look at when it comes to this topic is consistency. If players can consistently pull off winstreaks or stay on top of the leaderboards, it tells me there's enough expression for players to overcome RNG. It's why I didn't believe the claims made about Wildfrost being too RNG heavy when that game first dropped.
Hey I’ve really started watching your videos and really liked your SOTE critique. I heard you’re into monster hunter too, is 4U worth playing? I finished iceborne and loved it! Fatalis and Alatreon were fantastic (minus that dps check nonsense).
Rng can turn off a lot of players when the low rolls come around, especially at higher difficulties. Whenever I see players play these sort of games, while I understand their frustration, there is a degree of truth that they still have agency that they couldve used to offset the bad Rng. There are instances I can think of from other games where it's the fault of the game devs for not telegraphing the proper actions to the player.
For example, Fire Emblem the Blazing Sword on Hector Hard mode requires players to retain specific items or find secret shops in prep for a very tough map many hours later. Else, the player will suffer many debilitating effects on their team that the game throws at them, on top of hard enemy spawns.
I very much enjoyed this video and hope to see more on the topic. (Would love to see you tackle Slay the Spire too as a huge fan of that)
Id love to hear you talk about Slay the Spire more.
Boy do I plan to, I think Spire is one of the best games ever made
Add it to the pile @@Theottree
People that argue like Joseph in his original video have never played a game like Chess. Sometimes giving up a piece is necessary to give yourself a better position in one way or another. In a game like Darkest Dungeon you will have to make decisions like "Do I let this character die to ensure the rest have a better outcome or do I keep them alive and take the risk"? The concept of giving up something to get something is EVERYWHERE in games, it's just most of the time you aren't thinking about it because it's subtle.
Even with 700+ hours in these games I've had runs where I entered a fight. Rng party got startled and had characters die on the first round before I can even make a single move many times.
Shits painful.
I've had plenty of really rough circumstances but I don't think I've ever run into a character death before I could act, in about ~670 hours of playtime. I've seen it and I know it can happen, but I think I've been somewhat fortunate. Or I've suppressed the memory lol
@@Theottree this usually happens from bosses. The last time this happened to me as the Flesh boss killed my vestal turn 1.
Those damn tails.
I've also achieved Grand Slam on DD2.
So I've had both tremendous luck and some instances like this that where just unavoidable.
I had one run go with that had a Flagellant and vestal in DD2.
80% DB resistance.
Flagellant died first DD roll of the run.
Vestal later survived 7 DD rolls with 30% chance.
But that was all my fault.
Good video
It’d be funny to ask Joseph what he thinks of something like Poker
i'm a certified 100% RNG hater and even then "i died, there was nothing i could've done there" isn't part of my list of gripes with it.
my biggest problem with rng generally is the opposite, bad players can sometimes get rewarded, which can lead to bad habits.
Yeah that's a design problem that these games have to contend with. Sort of a cursed problem - the very nature of variance means that sometimes the incorrect play is rewarded and the correct play is punished. Which can have an obfuscating effect on what is right to do.
@@Theottree yep, it's to some extent instrinsic to the mechanic, though certain design can mitigate it at a high level (if the best player can still win with the worst luck).
you seem to talk about variance instead of rng, are those two synonymous to you? i think variance can exist without necessarily pulling a random number but i want to know what terms are you using.
"This is the consequence of me not respecting the potential danger of point blank shot."
I have some problems with this sentence. Firstly, the player has to know the specific enemy with the specific attack is possible. The player has to know the possible damage range for the attack. The player has to know what position the attack can target. And only then can the player even think about respecting it - at the cost of not respecting gods know how many else attacks with potential for 1 hit killing.
Where can the player even learn these in the game? How can a player tell the maximum and minimum damage of the attack? How can a player decode if the previous 23 times was the RNG being funky, is can this attack really only target the character in the first position? These pieces of information are obscured from the player by design.
This will have been far from the first time Joseph has seen a Bloodletter, and far from the first time he's seen a Bloodletter use Point Blank Shot. This is a Champion-level Dungeon; he's almost assuredly seen this enemy type many many times before. In the most charitable possible case to him, he is still well aware that the enemy has a move that does a lot of damage, and seems to only target position 1. He doesn't need to know the exact specifics of every possibility of the move to respect possible outcomes from it. Even without the character death we see, just a high damage Point Blank Shot could've put Joseph in a lot of trouble even with his character alive.
As I said maybe the player should be privy to a bit more, but they're not. This is one of the slight improvements Darkest Dungeon 2 makes over 1; it gives the player more information on enemies and, once they've seen them used, their moves. The 'surprise' factor is still there for moves and enemies you've never seen, but once you have seen them, you get better information to base your gameplay on.
@@Theottree eh, true. I guess my problem with the sentence I quoted is not accurate to the context you used it, because to me it sounded like "respecting point blank shot" is something that should be expected of every player, regardless of their experience with the game.
Thank you for engaging with my comment in good faith regardless of my fuckup
But how does it make you FEEL?
Reminds me of competitive pokemon, of all things. Most moves have chance to miss, or a chance to inflict a certain status condition, or can land a critical hit for 50% additional damage. This variance turns a lot of people off from the competitive scene, but they miss the fact that high level play pretty much never is determined by RNG. Risky play is pretty much asking to be smitten by RNGesus, and it’s the risky players fault for even putting themself in that position to begin with.
Another weird audio cut at 2:33
do you stream theo?
Not at current. It's an idea I keep batting around. Probably will at some point.
What I hate about all this is that the difference between a player and a 'skilled player' is often not in how they approach any given situation, but their willingness to play the obvious meta stuff that's better than everything else. Choosing to play meta has a way more severe effect on your chances of winning than any mild incremental, cumulative increase in skill.
'Playing meta' in these games is more or less just playing in a manner that maximises one's odds at victory. So like, it makes a lot of sense that the consistently better players consistently play in ways that make them more likely to win - but it's notable also that they are able to win without 'playing meta' as well. People have beaten Darkest Dungeon without Vestals, without Stuns, etc etc.
Moreover, the thing with these games is that the optimal play will often entail a choice that is 'non-meta', or not typically strong. The nature of variance is such that it creates scenarios in which lesser-used options sometimes get their chance to shine when the stars align. Or the gamestate simply presents something that the 'normal' best play cannot easily handle.
Joseph is very much playing meta in this clip of his. He's running all 'meta' characters with their 'meta' skill loadouts and trinkets, and the basic principal behind his move choices - alpha strike backline, clean up frontline - is the conventionally understood best manner of handling the majority of fights.
So to say, I don't really agree. But at the same time, making good choices in terms of your approach to the challenges presented to you is part of the skill expression in these sorts of games. Worse players have rosters they've taken worse care of, with worse quirks locked in and more diseases, they bring worse compositions, provision worse, and play those compositions worse. In strategy games like this, the validity of making worse choices in the pursuit of expressing some sort of personal playstyle (I'm not sure what this would even mean) seems like a really peculiar idea, especially to level at a game critically. Is it an issue with Poker that I have limited means to express my own playstyle, and my playstyle may often be notably worse in terms of expected outcome than the better play?
Bruh her stuns are the only reason i take plauge doctor
Weirdly hard audio cut 0:22
Hopefully you play Outer wilds soooooon, it’s worth iiiiiit
Would you believe me if I told you it is my intention to start it sometime within the next week?
@@Theottree Yeah on the last Efap you were on you mentioned wanting to play it soon, though I’m happy it’s much sooner then I would’ve expected. Whether you make a video on it or not I’m just happy you’re playing it.
@@Theottree Are you considering streaming it?
Not gonna lie, when I saw his Elden Ring critique followed by his effusive praise of its' DLC, I knew he had no idea what he was saying in his DD review. SoTE had all the base game problems magnified by 10, and he seemed to ignore that, along with plenty of other things in his Zelda reviews.
There is a couple of things that are unmentioned in this video.
1. How this kind of RNG effects future decisions, and not just analyzing the past ones. That's what I initially though the video is gonna be about, how a player gives up on possibilities they have left to capitalize on despite the bad RNG.
2. How it affects a completely new player that does not have the foreknowledge of enemy attack patterns, how a player like that has "things to do" in a situations like that. Cause your analysis comes from an omniscient player perspective effectively.
I'm a bit disappointed cause the conclusion of this video is "Git good in your risk mitigation next time bozo", which I think misses the actual progression of gaining such skill and how it happens in actual in game scenarios.
The 2. point I think is especially important, cause I believe that's closer to Joseph's perspective.
The only thing I really want to respond to here is that Joseph absolutely has foreknowledge of the enemy attack patterns in this case. This is a Champion dungeon. This is not the first Brigand group he's seen, the first Brigand Bloodletter he's seen (the tutorial has a mandatory one), or the first Point Blank Shot he has seen. The questions around a new player first-contact experience with a given enemy and a given move is a very different consideration from whether or not the game has 'done anything wrong' when it punishes loose play in a situation that has a chance to be very dangerous.
Good video! As someone whos played MMO's for years and beat BG3 on honour mode...I HATE RNG! No seriously im so sick of game devs relying on rng for everything nowadays >.
Great video Theo! You should play Balatro you will love it lol, also what's your opinion on the RNG in XCOM 1 and 2? I feel the combat is the sole reason I cannot get into that game at all, as it largely relies the percentage chance for hits. It can be so infurating that you have the best strategy you can have and still lose, hence why I believe save scumming is a thing in that game. I would just prefer a harder game than RNG in XCOM's case, or have something like DD where you have more agency to help you out in these cases. Also I feel using Slay the spire in this case is a bit different as it is run based right? Does time factor into your assessment as you can have more investment into DD and XCOM campaigns and can lose completely(for XCOM), while slay the spire ( and balatro for that matter) you can be done in 60-90 mins. Cheers
Honestly I feel similarly to XCOM as compared to Darkest Dungeon. The big difference between them is that there is an explicit time limit and non player-dictated scaling in XCOM 2, whereas in Darkest Dungeon the missions available are always based on your roster's level. In combat though you've got loads of agency in terms of your play to handle even the tougher spots - and access to evac lets you quickly get out of dodge in those spots where it is too much. XCOM has its issues and I have my gripes with it, but I think they are really good tactics games where the skill of the player really gets to shine while also offering a wide variety of gameplay circumstances to keep the experience fresh.
Regarding the difference between Spire and these games, I don't personally put much stock in the time consideration, as I think the important part is the playing of the game - the time investment is of secondary concern. Like I don't think a long, long run of XCOM 2 that ultimately ends in my defeat is 'wasted' in any real sense. I see these games as 'run-based' in that same sort of way.
Who the hell puts a helion on the front row?
It's a pure damage dealer with reach.
The Hellion is best placed in position 1. From position 1 she can attack every enemy rank: 1-2 with Wicked Hack, 2-3 with If It Bleeds, 4 with Iron Swan. You shouldn't really play the Hellion in any other position, as this ability to apply damage anywhere it is relevant is a large part of what makes her so powerful.
When I lose I reset, this might be because i binged Akex Kidd or whatever it was called just like my parents did. They put the solution to the bosses on the backside of the manual, rock/paper/scissiors is 100% consistant other than the last 2 bosses and it has an underwater maze with terrible controls. Must have binged that game so hard it has harsh live count but it's a great one!
On the note of DD Hellion is AWFUL for blind playing, by far the worst even Antiquarian has less chance of death because the character is obviously weak both defense and offense so you don't see it as a fighting class while it does give artifacts. Hellion is strong but weaker than glass of course she dies the first dozen uses. Of course Abomination is never learned because transformed is stronger, stress costs money to remove and early on that's not possible. Of course Flagellant is a red hering healer even worse than Occultist early on because of low HP requirement to actually apply the heal leading to him not being learned as a healer. DD is a game of knowledge and numbers, miss one you conplain. Former is a grind of a website the latter is simple will of persistance.
So what you are saying is... it's a skill issue?
Short man bad
(Jk another great video 🔥)
A well thougth out video with some interesting perspectives.
If you excuse the diversion from the topic at hand. I'd like to bring to your attention the "stop killing game" movement/action by Ross from Accursed farms. He has long been a vocal opponent to the practice of game publishers "killing" ganes after support end, effectively destroying your property and erasing art. In the last year, he has taken more direct action and come up with several approaches to get the legality on the matter settled. One of the mroe promising of which is a European Citizens Initiative to get the practise essentially banned by EU law. Though such requires 1 000 000 signatories of the initiative so getting the word out about it is vital. I know you are no longer from the EU, but I am sure you got some followers who are.
To learn more, I suggest the somewhat tacky named video by accursed farms "europeans can save gaming" as well as the follow up FAQ video. And if you find yourself agreeing with the initiative, please help spreading the word as that is key to actually ending one of the many plagues on modern gaming industry rather than just screaming about it at the void.
4:51 You are basically repeating yourself here and not really responding to Joseph Anderson. What if a player plays darkest Dungeon perfectly and mitigates everything and that still happens? Like his example has clear mistakes, but what is your response if all the characters were at full health and the Zealot was one shotted on the first turn? This can happen in Darkest Dungeon. That's not variance, that's BS! If I always need to use stun to mitigate that BS, that's not really variance and instead seems like there's only one way to play this game to it's end without losing important party members!
If I had a nickel for every video about Joesph Anderson I saw this week, I'd have 2 nickels and while I'm not surprised it happened twice it is weird since I don't watch him
mint
Pseudo-intellectual doing a case study on another pseudo-intellectual.
Hilarious content theo!
Still no Witcher 3 video btw
Also, this was a really civil and thorough analysis!
This game bamboozled so many people, just because they believed that the characters are actual characters, and not disposable assets.
You can invest quite a lot into them, BUT it is the accessories are the only truly important thing you have to focus on.
Nah fam. Getting the right quirks and debuffs is a make or break on a character.
Insanity can fuck you right up if you ain’t spec’d right. Or maybe your slow AF because you don’t have just the right amount of light.
Or you constructed your party to fight the boss of an area, but you got fucked by a random Mini Boss rolling up on your ass.
Characters matter a shit ton.
Of course they matter, but they are not irreplaceable, while losing artefacts can cripple you for dozen hours.
@@lolno3906 you literally get an artifact retrieval quest after certain conditions are met. It’s a fight with a super fast, super evasive Raven.
It’s almost as if the game is contradicting your “irreplaceable” quote…
While you don’t see a “revive your entire party” scenario pop up, now do you? You get it MAYBE, but the artifact recovery quest is GUARANTEED.
A good character build being lost is much more of a detriment than losing an artifact… especially when you can count on the game giving it back with a degree of certainty.
Are you gonna roll the dice perfectly and get your character that you poured thousands of gold into again?
Artifact recovery quest is guaranteed at some point in the future, IF you can actually kill the Raven and that is big if.
I never mourned hero, I always mourned their stuff.
@@lolno3906 I think you kill the nest for trinket recovery, and kill raven to get his own boss trinkets. I disagree on your value assessment as well, to set up a GREAT hero you need to pour insane ammount of gold into him (getting a hero to lvl 5/6, buying skills, upgrading skills, upgrading weapons and armor, getting 3 Good quirks, putting him away in sanitarium for 3 weeks to lock them and paying very high ammount of gold to do so, and paying to remove very bad quirks if they show up) as opposed to, say, doing a quest to get an orange trinket, or even paying the gypsy for it.
I honestly do not understand the point of this video. I know this was not supposed to be a rebuttal to his Darkest Dungeon video, but it sure seemed like that. This moment connects to his larger critique of the game, mainly the endless grind and the unclear rules. Because of that moments like these can seem unavoidable. For example: Talisman of Flame trinket says "-100% DMG and -100% stress DMG from Revelation skill". This is a lie, because Templars still deal chip damage, which can result in a Deathblow. This is the same thing he mentioned in his Elden Ring video, considering Great Runes. From the tutorial you can clearly read, that Great Runes power can give EVEN MORE benefits when you use a Rune Arc, so that means it should give some power baseline. In both instances the game essentially lies to you, and why? It's either been bugged (for 9 and 2 years respectively), or worse, it's a wording error which would take 10 seconds to correct. I have never played Darkest Dungeon, but I love watching it and have watched an ungodly amount of hours. I don't have a psyche for the despair, nor the patience for the grind, and I prefer watching someone else suffer.
This reminds me of when I tried the game Xenonouts. There are things there, which I absolutely despise. Cheating computer, unclear rules, enemies not working according to their own descriptions, RNG making your soldiers literally shoot each other in the back, ever encompassing fog of war making it so you are severely reduced in the possibilities of a tactical play... It all groups together into an experience, that was very unpleasant to me, just like everything in Shadow of the Erdteee did to you.
Joseph's Darkest Dungeon video had some errors, this section being one of them, but it very well conveyed a message for people's who aren't fond of RNG and hidden rules kicking their ass: Don't bother with playing. And if you like the vibes (which in both Darkest Dungeons are immaculate), just watch Baertaffy.
This islolated incident in joe's video coupled with your statment that it seems unfair/hopeless until you trace the events and decisions that led the incident are true and incitefull when discussing probability as a whole.
Most roguelikes (lites) would fit this example however I'll look at one of my favorites and one you have mentioned several time on efap: Slay the spire. As someone with many hours of exp, I believe the biggest adversity and parabol to darkest dungeon risk managment would be card draw. Lets say you're on act 2 boss The Champ and you got him past 50% hp. He enrages and will hit you with massive damage and you need you specific defensive cards this turn however you draw mostly attacks and utility. You may say this was just unlucky and there was nothing you could have done. However, your prior pathing and event decisions, how you constructed your deck based on what was offered as rewards and sold in shops, heck even when you actively chose to drop his health below half, etc; Everything led up to this outcome weither you realize or not. Knowing what cards you need and balancing with what the game offers is crucial to reliable sustain and is exactly what you lay out for Joe's gameplay here. Roguelikes are largely games of hindsight. In darkest's case, you permanently losing a character is the culmination of your choices.
Weither Joe likes or dislikes the concept of perma death is irrelevant when he denigrates the game for having said system simply because he made poor decisions.
I grew up with a friend who consistently rage quit games we played together, often in a DSP style "It's the games fault" so it is one of my biggest pet peeves for someone to fault a piece of art due to their own impatience, ignorance, or just plain stupidity. I've seen several videos criticizing/using Joe as an example for their topic, yet I appreciate you Theo for your measured and calm look at his reviews. You deconstuct his points to find the answer of Why did he say this/feel this way? especially considering you were once a fan and saw what he's been doing all this time and gradually becoming worse. I love media critiques on youtube (even listening to ones on stuff I have little to no exp with) which why efap has been a wonderful show and you are one of my favorite guests : )
Ah shit ha you even used Slay the spire I apologize for the repetitive comment 😅
Another even more related example I just thought of is being mindful of crit thresholds in pokemon nuzlockes.
Joseph Anderson’s analysis of a game being bad? I’m shocked 😧
that collector fight was making me sweat so hard xD
Lmao same, I stuck around way longer than I should've. I was too stubborn to take the L until it was all too clear it was a lost cause
@@Theottree tbf i thought there was a possibility to win for a while, but then you got a couple unlucky rolls(especially on the HM) and initiative order wasnt on your side and i was like "nah thats it, better run" xD
great video btw